Collected Short Fiction, page 435
A special monorail car, sighing along at four miles a minute over the high steel thread, took Shane to Key West. Two Guard engineers accompanied him, carrying one of the polarizer units that had been taken from the Friendship.
That night a Guard amphibian took them from the Base to a low, barren coral islet that lay half in the Ring and half Outside. Shane shook hands with the engineers, then sealed himself in the clumsy bulk of the air-suit. Awkward in it, he mounted the silent electric bicycle and tried it out on the hard beach within the Ring.
Swiftly the engineers set up the compact polarizer. They anchored it with long steel spikes driven into the coral and ran wires to the controls, a hundred feet back from the Ring. One of them leaned the motorcycle against the Ring’s invisible wall, above the polarizer. He stepped back and called out.
“Okay, Joe!”
Something slapped the motorcycle through the Ring.
“Okay, Lieutenant,” said the engineer. “Your turn.”
Clumsily Shane walked across the coral sand. He pressed his armored body flat against the invisible barrier of vibration. Waiting there while the engineers fumbled with something, he had to fight a momentary panic.
Science had given him Clayton’s face and Clayton’s voice. He had tried to learn how Clayton talked, how he behaved and even how he thought. Still he wasn’t Clayton. One tiny blunder might destroy both him and America.
“Luck, Lieutenant!”
He was glad to hear that brisk voice, because it broke his dread. He moved his hand in a silent signal. Something clicked, a little tube glowed blue and the Ring didn’t exist. Air-pressure, like a mighty hand, flung him forward—Outside!
DAZEDLY Shane got back his breath in the heavy helmet and stumbled to his feet. He shuffled toward the dark forms of the engineers, but the Ring had come back and he collided with its unseen wall.
The engineers moved and he knew they were speaking, yet no sound came through. For a moment he was conscious of a painful loneliness. With the dials on the chest of the suit, he snapped on the radio. A blare of American dance music lifted his spirits.
He resisted an impulse to call Key West Base. He knew from Clayton’s maps that the Outsiders had established outposts of some sort, within a few hundred miles of the Ring. It was one of them, designated on the maps as “Point Fourteen,” that he hoped to reach. Possibly, too, patrol rockets would be sent even closer to the Ring under cover of night, for the Outsiders by now might be wondering why Clayton hadn’t returned. There was danger that any report might be overheard.
He set up the motorcycle and mounted it stiffly. With a last wave to the engineers, he turned down the first barren slope of the abyss that once the sea had filled. Now he was on his own.
The low coral islet became a dark, looming hill behind him and the two men there were lost. The atmosphere under the Ring made a misty blur against the sky, but the stars that filled the black heavens of the Outside burned with a cruel, naked splendor.
The electric vehicle ran without sound, for there was no air to carry vibration. Its headlight made a tiny, defiant glow against the overwhelming dark. Under the synthetic rubber tires, age-dried weed crumbled to noiseless dust. Empty sea-shells went soundlessly to powder.
The silent wheels jolted over grotesque arms of dead coral, down and down into the chasm that once the sea had filled. Shane inched up the speed and began to take chances on the bumps.
Elation mounted in him. This was the dream of his childhood. He had always dreamed of going Outside, to explore the bottom of the empty oceans and plumb all the mysteries of his wondering youth.
His heart began to pound. He crouched lower in the saddle of the jolting motorcycle and his thick gloves tightened on the handlebars. He jumped a black pit in the dry seafloor and careered around a boulder. He piled up in the next hole.
Drunkenly he struggled to his feet. He felt hot, fevered. Suddenly he knew what was wrong. He was breathing so much oxygen, he was intoxicated with it.
He adjusted the valves and sanity came back to him. Once more he perceived the sobering perils ahead. He closed the valves a little farther. A few pounds of oxygen might be the price of life itself, before he reached Point Fourteen.
He set up the motorcycle. Except for a few bent spokes in the front wheel, it seemed uninjured. He mounted again and rode on down, more slowly now, into the sea’s empty chasm.
THE air-suit, with its burden of oxygen tanks and equipment, was already heavy and irksome. It was ingenious enough. A tiny chemical unit with gold-film power returned drinking water, glucose and fresh oxygen from the moisture and carbon dioxide in the exhaled air. The inside pockets held equipment and packets of concentrated food. He could slip his arms out of the heavy sleeves to reach them.
There was even a waste-disposal valve. But no ingenuity could have made the thing really comfortable for so long a march as this.
Presently the Sun came up. With almost the violence of physical shock, frigid night became blinding day. Through the transparent face-plate, the Sun struck with a savage, blistering force. Despite its reflecting silver paint, the suit became uncomfortably hot, yet every ink-black shadow among the rocks remained a well of bitter cold.
All that glaring day he went on, with only a few brief pauses for rest, then all the following night. The oxygen and the gold-film cells would last only a few weeks. He had to reach Point Fourteen before they were exhausted.
Long since, the misty blur of the Ring had been lost behind him. He pushed the jolting, silent vehicle across dry mud flats and dead, dark hills, down into the vast desolation of the vanished Atlantic.
It was just before dawn of the second day when the damaged front wheel abruptly collapsed. Thrown from the wrecked machine, he pitched down a rocky slope. He had to move hastily to slap an emergency patch over a hole that a broken spoke had torn in the thick fabric of his suit.
Shaken and breathless, he fumbled uselessly with the wreckage, though the first glance had told him that repairs were out of the question. At last he reluctantly left it and plodded on.
Thereafter, he lost his count of the days. He lived and struggled from moment to moment. He had a job to do and he was trying to do it. It didn’t matter greatly whether it was day or night. The sky was always dark. No matter how strange the wastes of age-baked, black-fissured sea-mud about him, or how wild the crags of uneroded mountains, he couldn’t get lost.
He knew the direction of Point Fourteen. Always he could find it, by looking for some familiar group of stars. That was all he had to do—just follow the stars down into the empty sea. The little headlight fastened on the helmet helped to pick out his way.
It didn’t matter how his body ached from effort, or how the pressure of the heavy suit chafed him, or how stale the air became, or how the numbing drunkenness of weariness begged for him to stop. There was nothing to do but go on.
He never knew how long it took him to climb that last black volcanic range, which once the sea had drowned. Rugged precipices opposed him. Sharp lava tripped and impeded him. Recklessly he opened the valves to give himself a new spurt of energy.
It was close to sunset when he came to the summit of the range. Hopefully he looked beyond the cragged pass. According to Clayton’s maps, Point Fourteen ought to be in sight from here, on the crown of another range sixty miles beyond.
FROM his feet, the shadows fell.
They made chasms of frigid midnight. Half-afraid to look, he let his eyes range farther. Past the black, ragged shadow of the range lay another desert plain, vaster than any he had crossed. Another wall of stark hills broke it, mile on mile beyond.
There was no gleaming dome, no moving rocket, no work of man.
Wearily he sat down on a rugged jut of lava. Once, sometime in the blur of the past, he had seen some rusted steel plates. They must have been part of a ship sunk long before the Dwarf tore the oceans away. But that was the only hint that men had ever been Outside before him.
A dull despair began to chill him. Would he ever find New Britain?
He began to fumble with the radio dials on the chest of the bulky suit, listening anxiously for any human voice. But his straining ears heard only the hiss and crackle of static.
The Sun went down. Like a black tide of death, freezing shadows flowed up through the pass. Barry Shane shivered in the clumsy air-suit and kept fumbling with the radio dials. Slowly the roar of the Sun’s interference faded out around them.
An hour later, the first voice came through.
Strange in the phones, it sounded harsh and guttural and twangy. At first he thought it was a totally foreign language. It had been repeated three times before he could distinguish the familiar English words.
“Point Fourteen, calling Rocket Avenger
Then the reply came in. It was a garbled blur of strident gutturals, but presently he began to catch a few words.
“Patrol . . . Barrier . . . no trace . . . all night.” The last phrase was clear. “Captain Barlow, contact off.”
Shane listened all, night to the scraps of conversation he could pick up. Whispering huskily in the big helmet, he practiced the harsh accent. It was easier to learn than he had expected. Part of the strange harshness, he thought, was probably due to the fact that the Outsiders lived and spoke under a pressure of only some four pounds of a special gas mixture that was three-quarters oxygen, instead of fifteen pounds of the twenty per cent mixture called air.
That was a fact the engineers had learned from their study of the Friendship. Four pounds of internal pressure put much less strain on a sealed ship or a dome-city than fifteen. The helium and other inert gases in the mixture were less likely to cause the bends if any accident caused a change of pressure. There was no nitrogen to form deadly bubbles in the blood.
But sound conduction, in the synthetic mixture, was different.
Late the third night, Shane called for help, though he knew his accent still wasn’t perfect. All his preparations had been too hurried. Clayton had spent years getting ready for his invasion of America, only to fail.
The dropping pressure in the oxygen tanks cut off Shane’s time. He snapped on the tiny short-wave transmitter built into the big helmet.
“Calling Point Fourteen,” he panted feebly into the mike. “Captain Clayton—of the Friendship—calling Point Fourteen. Calling—”
HE swift reply startled him. “Clayton, where are you?” The harsh voice seemed surprised and excited. “This is Point Fourteen. Go on, Clayton!”
Shane made his voice fainter.
“Friendship’s lost,” he gasped. “I’m in—suit, sixty miles west of—Point Fourteen—Please pick—me up.” He let his feeble voice wander incoherently. “Message from America. . . . Can’t breathe. . . . Power going, but I’ll keep on the light. . . .”
“Hang on, Clayton,” rasped the phones. “We’ll send for you. I think the Avenger is hot.”
“Hurry!” gulped Shane. “Can’t breathe . . . much longer.”
He kept his headlight flashing into the east. Presently the blue glare of rockets grew and sank among the stars. The ship dropped a hundred yards from him, on silent ion-blasts that brushed rugged lava points with white incandescence.
The Avenger was larger than the Friendship and it carried no disguise to make it look like a harmless boulder. The sleek, tapered lines of its welded gray hull were honestly vicious and deadly.
Shane pretended to be half-unconscious, though any such pretense was almost needless. He had waited almost too long to make the call. The oxygen pressure was low and the chemical air-unit had stopped for want of power.
The glare of jutting rocket-tubes ceased, but a searchlight speared him blindingly. Lights flashed from the opening valve at the base of the upright ship. Portable lights bobbed toward him across the lava.
CHAPTER X
New Britain
MEN pulled Shane upright. Harsh voices reached him faintly, but his radio had gone dead, along with the power cells. He couldn’t understand the dim sounds that came through the suit. He moved to show that he was still alive and then relaxed. They carried him through the valves of the rocket and took him out of the air-suit. It was good to breathe clean air again, but he kept his breathing slow and his eyes closed, pretending to be out.
An elevator lifted him. He was put in a bed. A savage pressure smashed him against it and he knew the rocket was in flight again. He heard voices around him.
“Captain Clayton, can you speak?” He had been troubled about the stubble of beard on his unshaven face and his counterpart of Clayton’s narrow mustache. The bio-chemical treatment of his skin was intended to give his growing beard and hair the bronze color of Clayton’s, at least for a few weeks. He had been worried about a possible difference in shade. Evidently, though, they were accepting him as Clayton. Either the beard was all right, or else these men didn’t know Clayton well.
Shane muttered something and let his eyes open blearily. Men surrounded him. He assumed a vacant, unseeing stare, yet he managed to see a good deal. These men—officers, doubtless, of the Avenger—wore brown uniforms with black stars on their sleeves. Did that mean they were members of the mysterious Black Star party?
They began to hammer questions at him.
“What happened to you in America? Do you feel all right? What happened to the Friendship? Have the Americans any defenses, besides the Barrier? Will you advise Admiral Gluck to attack?”
Shane listened and muttered unintelligibly, still practicing the accent. They could think he was out of his head. Despite the impatient questions, they displayed respect. Clayton, he realized, must be fairly important.
At last the thrust of rocket-motors ceased. The ship swayed and was still. Shane knew that they had landed. He tried to gather his resources for the next test of the masquerade, deciding that it wasn’t safe to pretend half-consciousness any longer. He didn’t want the attention of doctors. They might too easily find the scars of his facial operations. He tried weakly to sit up in bed.
“Hello,” he muttered. “So you picked me up, eh?”
He thought his accent wasn’t bad and hoped that the half-intentional weakness of his voice would hide any flaws. A heavy man in brown stepped quickly to the side of his bed.
“Don’t you know me, Clayton? Captain Barlow, of the Avenger. Seems we were just in time.”
“Thanks, Barlow.” Shane tried to assume Clayton’s grin. “Guess I was about finished. Where are we?”
The heavy man looked puzzled. “You must have been through torture, Clayton.” He clucked sympathetically. “I can see what an effort you’re making. You’ve got to pull yourself together. We’ve just come down to Point Fourteen. Admiral Gluck has signaled me to take you aboard the Nemesis, to report at once. Can you stand up?”
“I think so,” mumbled Shane. “Save your voice for the Admiral. We’ll fix you up.”
BROWN-UNIFORMED orderlies supported him into a compact bathroom. The tiny spray of water was disconcerting, until he remembered how precious water must be Outside. Doubtless it was distilled and used again and again. The shower refreshed his fatigue-drugged body and awakened him to new awareness of the many perils ahead.
The stubble on his face was only a little too dark, but he was glad of the chance to shave it off with an odd-looking razor. He left the narrow coppery mustache. The mirror cheered him, for it gave back Clayton’s reckless, green-eyed grin.
Barry Shane was appalled by the endless risks of this desperate game, yet this was just the sort of adventure that sharpened Clayton’s enjoyment of life. It helped Shane to try to imagine that he was really the daring, hard-eyed fighting man whose face he wore.
The orderlies had laid out a brown uniform that fitted him fairly well. He transferred to its pockets the little platinum case of Clayton’s and the letter from the American Corporation Control Board to Atlantis Lee.
A central elevator dropped him and Captain Barlow to the base of the rocket. Orderlies helped them into air-suits. As they entered the valve, air-pumps throbbed and the outer gate clanged open. Shane had his first glimpse of Point Fourteen. It made him shudder in the heavy suit.
It was day again. The blinding Sun had come back into the dark, changeless sky, above a rugged mountain wall that marched ink-black across the east. Point Fourteen was a roughly leveled plateau, dotted with low domes of gray metal. Upon it stood a rocket fleet.
Queerly ominous, the tapered gray cylinders stood on end, supported by angular landing stanchions. They glittered under the Sun and cast long, stark, black shadows. They were like rows of shells in some old munitions factory, before the age of the Ring. They were like metal monuments in some fantastic graveyard of giants.
They were symbols of death—scores-of rocket-bombers!
A cold hand of apprehension grasped Shane’s heart. America had no weapon that could stop these evil machines from destroying the Ring Cylinder, nor could hope to find one. And this, he grimly reminded himself, was only Point Fourteen. For all he knew, there might be thirteen other rocket fleets, or thirty. In the big helmet, he caught his breath.
He could not fail! He had to win!
An armored car was waiting at the air-lock. Shane and Barlow clambered in and it rolled away through a sinister colonnade of rockets. It jolted heavily on rocks, but there was no sound. The silence of the Outside became queerly oppressive to Shane.
The valves of the Nemesis opened for them and an elevator carried them up to the quarters of Admiral Gluck. Brown guards admitted them to a room hung with a barbaric display of weapons, ranging from curved wooden boomerangs to a duplicate of Clayton’s paralysis gun.
“Well, Clayton!”
THE sharp, impatient voice was oddly high, almost shrill. It came from a thin, little man standing behind a desk. As he made a queer stiff-armed salute with exaggerated mechanical precision, medals jingled on his brown breast.
