Collected Short Fiction, page 43
One man had a moon-calf’s scarlet scale, polished to a ruby disk. He wore it on a platinum chain, and swore that no harm could come to him until it was lost. Another pinned his faith on a fragment of a meteorite that had somehow found its way into his bunk when the stone had struck the ship upon which he was then serving. And there was a tall young Canadian who had a red wool sweater of marvelous properties—he had had a miraculous escape, after a collision in space, while wearing it. He had unravelled so much of it to give away as charms to his comrades that little more than the collar was left. And all swore devoutly that not a man had been injured in the thousand perils of their trade, who had had a thread of that sweater about his person.
Gardiner was utilizing his spare time to write a monograph on his latest work in electromagnetic vibration, and I helped with that, taking dictation and revising his notes. He was one of the few men of great intellect, whose genial good-nature and unfailing cheerfulness makes it a pleasure to be near.
And, as we sped through space, I thought more of the girl I had met at Theophilus, who had called herself Mary Jons. I wondered who she really was, where she had gone. I wondered if she could be actually as beautiful as I recalled her, wondered if I would find that I loved her as much as I felt that I did, if I should ever see her again.
There seemed small chance indeed that I would meet her on earth. But I had always imagined that she had gone back there. And I had a lover’s optimism.
IN spite of our delay during the battle with the war-fliers, our passage was unusually short. It was just nineteen days after Gardiner and I had left Theophilus that we entered the earth’s atmosphere. On the night of October 22, 2325, we entered the air, over the North Atlantic Ocean.
Landing had seemed to me quite a problem, in secrecy, at night, and on a strange planet. But Paul Doane did not seem at a loss. He took us westward, at an altitude of some fifty miles, until the lights of New York City were visible like a great flake of silver fire in the darkness below.
There he slanted down, reaching the ocean a few miles off Long Island. Landing on water, of course, is a far simpler matter than coming down on the cruel rocks of the moon, though the vastly greater gravitational pull of the earth complicates the matter somewhat.
And the gravity of the earth, six times that of the moon, was a very serious inconvenience to our own movements. Even with the Eagle resting still on the water, I felt the same unnatural affinity for the deck as when we had been accelerating with all our power, in space. Seats had been provided in the bridge-room, and feeling heavy and uncomfortable, we all made use of them.
Our voices sounded increasingly loud, as air was slowly admitted to the flier to raise the barometric pressure to that of the new planet. Not only does the heavier air of earth carry sound better than the atmosphere of the moon; but our auditory and vocal organs were adapted to the rarer air. After the landing, I found my hearing almost preternaturally acute; and I had considerable difficulty to keep my voice low enough not to sound conspicuous among the terrestrials.
The great shell drifted landward under the merest impulse of the blast, until the dark line of the land was visible through the murky air of earth, a half mile away. Then the men produced and launched a small, sheet-metal rowboat, which, I suppose, had been built during the voyage for just this emergency.
Gardiner and I stepped into it, after the oarsman was aboard, shaking hands with Doane. In five minutes we were landed on the sand, and the man took the boat back to the dark mass of the space flier. Watching, we saw the merest wisp of iridescent mist swirl toward us from where it had been, and it was lost in the night.
“Where is he going?” I asked Gardiner, my voice unexpectedly loud in the dense air.
“He intends to hide the ship in the north of Greenland. He will be back here three weeks from tonight, will send the boat to take us up.”
My sensations were the queerest imaginable. My memories of the earth were but scattered and vague, and when I had been taken to the moon, I was too young to appreciate the strangeness of a trip between worlds.
The gravity of the earth gave my body a leaden weight. Accustomed to travel by great strides, or by bounds of many yards, I found it difficult to pick up my feet. The air felt oppressive, close, moist. It was a squeezing pressure on my chest. And my sense of equilibrium was affected, for I reeled and stumbled, and had to sit down on the sand. Gardiner seemed to be suffering as much as myself.
“It’s just the gravity,” he said. “It will pass. We will be acclimated by daytime.”
For long hours we sat there.
All my sensations were strange, but I think the strangest thing was to be out of doors at night. I could not remember having been out at night before, for on the moon the touch of night is death. As we sat there, I looked at the stars. They were not motionless and bright like those of the moon; the thick, murky air gives them an odd wavering motion, the sky is never really black, and most of the stars are always screened in the air. Odors, too, were strange. There was a curious smell of growing things, of unfamiliar flowers, and the salty tang of the sea.
Then came sunrise. Not a sudden burst of blinding fire, but a symphony of changing, multitudinous shafting shades of liquid light, wonders of pale dawn-cloud, tinted with softest gold, miracles of crimson and purple, splendors of deepest azure of gorgeous gold. A ruddy sun was born from a sea of molten glory.
And we rose from our seats on the sand, two strangers on an unknown sphere—with a vast and perilous mission before us.
CHAPTER XIII
The New York Negotiations
THE beach on which we had landed had seemed very lonely by night, but it was not so by day. A half mile above the water rose the colossal pile of a building, enclosed in a glittering armor of glass, somewhat like my familiar cities on the moon. But this edifice was slender, and two hundred stories tall, with a flat landing stage upon its summit.
All about it the grounds were beautifully landscaped; hedges, lawns, and clumps of flowering trees, scattered with fountains, golf links, and promenades, extended down to the beach where we stood.
A mile farther on was another vast building, and to the right of that were two more slender, towering structures. And there were more beyond, the farther ones dwarfed by distance, and blue-like, far-off hills. All Long Island was scattered with them, and the land beyond the Sound.
The carefully tended pleasure-gardens were incredibly beautiful to one from the drear wastes of the moon, bright with the luxuriant emerald vegetation of eternal spring. With climatic control, which boundless atomic power had made simple on earth, though it is impossible under the vastly different conditions of the moon, winter has not come to New York for a hundred years, and orange trees bloom in its parks.
As we strolled up the silvery beach, under an oddly mild and genial sun, lost in the wonders of this unfamiliar world beneath a blue sky so bright that the stars could not be seen by day, the place awoke. The gleaming wings of airplanes flashed across from landing stage to landing stage; and the gardens were soon dotted with the dull-gray uniforms of the caretakers, and flecked with the brighter garments of a few young idlers bent on morning exercise.
Our sun-helmets and tattered white garments must have made us rather conspicuous, for I remember one blear-eyed old fellow, who was running a whirring automatic mowing machine, who stopped and stared at us a full minute as we walked past him. A bit farther on, strolling over a soft rich lawn bordered with a blaze of orchid bloom, we met a brightly dressed young man and a gay girl, with tennis rackets in their hands. “Hello, there my men. What’s your idea?”
Taken rather aback at this uncalled-for question, I looked at Gardiner.
“Tranco. N3D. 136 kn 9.” The old scientist answered glibly.
“Yes?” There was a note of suspicion in the youngster’s voice. “Then what’s the matter? How’d you come to be in a rig like that?”
“We’ve been in the Sahara. Prospecting. Aero dropped us on the beach at daylight.” He fished in his pocket, drew out a little disk of stamped aluminum and extended it to the fellow. “See?”
“Yes. Iden, all right. ‘Tranco. N3D. 136 kn 9.’ ” He handed it back. “Looks all right. But you had better watch out for the information gang.”
He turned to the girl, threw his arm about her familiarly. They strolled on over the bright garden, turning, once or twice, to stare back at us as if suspicious of our garb.
Gardiner turned to me. “Idle pleasure-seekers!” he muttered, a little contemptuous. “What would they do, set down to farm a crater on the moon?”
He handed me a little disk of that metal. “Identification tag. What he called an iden. Everybody has to have one. It tells what corporation you belong to, and how much pay you get. Also has your identification number on it. A man is ranked socially by the amount of pay shown on his tag.
“And as the young man hinted, we must be careful. Metals has spies everywhere, and we lunarians are fair game for them, to be treated as traitors if caught. We will be safer after we get under the protection of Tranco. But we must get to town at once, and get on different clothes.”
We walked on across the bright, unfamiliar gardens to the vast pile of glass and steel. We passed beyond the emerald lawns and masses of gay shrubbery, and entered the great building through revolving doors. An elevator shot us down to the business levels, a few hundred feet below the surface, where we found a dry-goods shop. Gardiner was well supplied with Tranco credit vouchers; and soon we were attired in the fashion of the city. I chose a crimson tunic, with blue robe and sash, while Gardiner contented himself with a dark green suit, with black mantle.
Then, at a higher level, we found the dining-rooms and had a breakfast of synthetic food mixture, served with orange juice. Having eaten, we purchased a news strip, upon which the happenings of the last few hours were recorded in the modern printing shorthand, and took the elevator to the roof.
On the landing stage there we engaged passage to the building on Manhattan Island which houses the executive offices of Tranco. Gardiner, reading the paper as the swift atomotored flier cut silently through the air, assured me that nothing was said to indicate that anyone had seen the arrival of the Eagle in the earth’s atmosphere.
In a few minutes we had landed on the great, threedecked stages of the Tranco Building, one of the largest in the world. Two hundred and seventy stories high, it covers sixty acres, and is the capitol of one of the largest corporations in existence.
We dropped by elevator to the floor given over to the Board of Directors. This proved a veritable palace, of beautiful architecture, finished with a splendor that was amazing to me. Here we interviewed a few secretaries in the little glass cells before the offices of the dignitaries whom they guarded. Gardiner did not wish to disclose our identity until he had learned something of the attitude of the corporation toward the war on the moon; but it seemed impossible to see anyone in authority so long as we were unknown.
BUT at last, in one of the long, bright-lit, splendid halls, which had moving ways like the streets of the moon cities, we met a little wrinkled man, who sprang to greet Gardiner with an eager exclamation.
He was, it seemed, one Robert Bakr, himself a Director of Tranco. A man of scientific interests and aspirations, he had long known of Gardiner and his brilliant work, had even met him at scientific gatherings in New York, years before.
He seemed delighted to meet the old scientist. He hurried us into his sumptuously furnished office, and inquired about our business on the earth. Gardiner lost no time in telling him the object of our visit. He could give us no assurance that Tranco would be willing to break the peace with Metals, but he assured us of the cordial friendship of the corporation.
After a time, he conducted us up to the offices of the President, in a suite of such splendor as would make a lunarian gasp with wonder. We were most warmly received by that dignitary, a tall man with iron-gray hair, named Frank Lewis. He inquired about conditions on the moon, commented on Gardiner’s scientific achievements, and invited us to come again.
He gave orders that we were to be treated as honored guests of Tranco. From his office Bakr took us to another where we were given passports that would insure our personal safety. Then he carried us off to his palatial suite in a building above the Palisades, and made us stop with him. We stayed at his splendid establishment as long as we were in New York. He and Gardiner had long discussions over my friend’s latest work in space-radio. The monograph was read, and I think Gardiner and Bakr worked out one or two new experiments together.
We saw Lewis again. He was certainly friendly enough; and I knew that his best wishes were with the insurgents on the moon, for the revolt threatened to break the power of his greatest enemy. But his memory of the war of 2307 was so strong that he hardly dared to take any open action.
One day a meeting of the Directors was called in the spacious and magnificent auditorium in the Tranco building. Gardiner spoke before it, making a powerful appeal for the cause of the moon, stressing not only the cause of right and human liberty, but the advantage to Tranco in having a free corporation on the moon, with which it could trade on an equality with Metals.
The Directors were doubtful, some of them frankly afraid. The meeting presently broke up without having come to any definite conclusion; but the case, we understood, was almost hopeless.
But Gardiner was not one to give up easily. He kept at work on the project. He saw Lewis often, and was most cordially received. And sometimes I warmed the cushions in an outer office for long hours while he was closeted with some other official. Now that his identity was known, his popularity became immense. He was a lion at the great social affairs, a guest eagerly sought for by the most exclusive circles. His simple manners and quiet taste in clothing even caused a fad of imitation in the fickle fashions of the time. But he did not forget his purpose; he used wit and intellectual attainment to work steadily toward his end.
That men were willing to listen to his brilliant talk or to invite him to their select social functions, did not mean that they were willing to go to war for the cause of the moon. After we had been on the earth ten days, the Directors held another meeting, influenced, perhaps, by diplomatic complications with Metals that had risen from our efforts, and solemnly resolved to let no cause “dissolve the ties of peace and friendship” that bound them to Metals.
But even then, Franklin did not despair. Bakr was still warmly friendly, he was still an admired and welcome guest in social circles, and at the offices of Lewis. He had met a wealthy young man, Lafollette, the head of the Chicago offices of Tranco, who held a deep devotion to lunar liberty. It seemed that Tranco might help us secretly, if she dared not do so openly.
One day, after he had been to some sort of secret conclave in the offices of Lewis, Franklin returned to Bakr’s suite, where I was waiting, with his smile of encouragement on his lean face. In reply to my eager inquiry, he said:
“Nothing definite. But a chance for something that will be worth a great deal to the moon.
“You remember the war of twenty years ago?”
“I should. Father was almost killed in it.”
“Then you know that Tranco had been building space-fliers. One Doctor Vardon had sold them an invention of his, a process for using gold to generate the atomic blast for propelling space ships. The experimental ships were discovered by Metals, wiped out. Vardon and all the men working with him were killed. The secret of the discovery was thought to have died with them.
“But Vardon left a widow and an orphan child—a girl. A few days after his death, they vanished. The information service of Metals hunted them for years, and Tranco officials, suspecting something, joined the search.
“Until a few years ago, it was not known why Metals wished to locate the mother and the girl. But last year Lewis received a communication from one Leroda Vardon, who claims to be the daughter of the dead scientist. She stated that she had in her possession the secret of the gold atomic blast, and offered to sell it. Lewis had her come to his offices for an interview, and had an investigation made of her claims. He is satisfied that they are genuine.
“It seems that the matter was brought up before the Board of Directors in secret session. Remembering their previous experience with the invention, they were afraid to make any attempt to use it. They endeavored to get possession of it; but the girl wanted a million units—the secret is worth a thousand times that, of course—and the penurious Assembly, not daring to use the secret after they had bought it, would offer no more than a half million. Nothing came of it except that the young woman was granted a pension to keep her from trying to dispose of the secret elsewhere.
“And, John, Leroda Vardon is now in New York. Lewis has arranged for Bakr and me to call on her tomorrow. It is possible that we can make some arrangement to get the discovery, if she really has the plans. And if we get it, it might be possible to build a fleet on the moon, in which the blast-projectors can be installed.
“And once we have a fleet, so we can communicate with earth, I think we can get help.”
THE next afternoon we flew out to one of the great buildings on Long Island—the very one at which Gardiner and I had landed. With Bakr as our guide, we descended elevator shafts, and glided down moving ways, and at last stopped before a door at the end of a hall, where there was a huge window looking out upon the green expanse of the ocean of earth.
Bakr pressed a button, and presently the great door swung open. We stepped into the vestibule, where Bakr left us seated for a moment, while he walked on into the next room. In a few minutes he came back and called Gardiner, and they were both gone for a time. I was not included in his gesture; and I remained seated, though I had a rather strong curiosity to see Leroda Vardon.
