Collected Short Fiction, page 441
The girl’s clear voice read aloud. “Urgent and confidential. Captain Barlow, patrol rocket Avenger, to Admiral Gluck, war rocket Nemesis. Open rebellion against Black Star. Revolt headed by Atlantis Lee, headquarters in Lee Observatory. Dr. Winston spreading unrest with propaganda rumors of danger from space. Rebels have been joined by man claiming to be Captain Glenn Clayton. Have evidence this man is impostor and traitor to Black Star. He does not possess Black Star Seal, as previously rumored. I urge immediate attack on observatory, before rebels can undermine Black Star authority with propaganda lies of approaching cataclysm.”
Shane felt cold and weak, as if the stark chill of the Outside were still in his blood. This was a cleverer blow than he had expected. His clammy hands clutched the edge of the battered lecture table.
It was hard to think of anything to do.
“Can you take me to the radio?” he asked. “I want to talk to Admiral Gluck.”
He knew he had to communicate with Gluck, but it was hard to think of what to say.
“Sure, Captain.” Tony Lee’s blue eyes were shining. He seemed completely unafraid. “We can try, but the Sun is up now and radio won’t reach very far. Barlow’s message came just in time to reach the relay stations. Now the solar interference has shut down.”
“We must try!” Shane insisted.
He followed the boy up a circular metal stairway into the communications turret. Evidently this was Tony Lee’s domain, for the metal walls were decorated with model rockets. Observation ports looked out in every direction, upon dead black mountains that had never seen the Sun until the Dwarf came, upon the gray disk of New Dover and the smaller domes around it.
Confidently the boy twisted dials.
“Lee Observatory, calling Rocket Nemesis!” he chanted into the microphone. “Captain Glenn Clayton, calling Admiral Gluck—”
HIS breathless voice broke off as the floor pitched and jerked. Shattering glass crashed somewhere. A great mushroom of white vapor grew up beside the observatory.
Black fragments of rock hurtled out of it. Debris rang against the observatory dome.
The boy’s eyes were still shining and he didn’t seem afraid. He knew that his world had only days to live. Death clanged and rattled incessantly against the metal dome, yet his voice was low and calm.
“That was a rocket-bomb, Captain. The fleet must be above us now, but maybe they can’t hear. The Sun plays queer tricks with radio . . .
CHAPTER XIX
Ring Around the World
THE hail of bomb splinters and rocky debris ceased. In the narrow little communications turret, above the observatory dome, Barry Shane turned to Atlantis Lee’s red-haired brother.
“Try again, Tony. Get me the admiral.”
Excited but unafraid, the boy went back to his dials.
“Lee Observatory,” he calmly resumed his chant, “calling Rocket Nemesis. Captain Glenn Clayton, calling Admiral Gluck—”
Barry Shane watched the dark sky. A glance toward the low Sun dazzled him. He couldn’t find the rocket fleet. Admiral Gluck’s shrill voice startled him.
“Hello, Clayton.” It rose and fell on a sea of hissing static. “Will you surrender the observatory and submit to a party trial on the charges of treason that have been made against you? Or do you want another and bigger bomb?”
Shane swallowed to clear his husky throat.
“I refuse to surrender,” he rapped in Clayton’s hard tones. “I am not a traitor. The real traitors are Barlow and his henchmen. I have let them show their hand.”
Upon the roaring static, Gluck’s sharp voice seemed uncertain.
“Can you explain your dealings with the enemies of the Black Star?”
“I can explain whatever I like.” Shane tried to speak curtly, like the Black Star’s leader. “Send a ship to pick up a confidential message. It will be stamped with the Black Star Seal.”
On the rushing static, Gluck’s thin voice audibly faltered.
“The Seal? But Barlow informed me—A ship will be sent at once, sir.” Atlantis Lee helped him compose the message and typed it on a sheet of gray metal foil. Shane stamped it with the scintillating crystal star in Clayton’s ring.
A grave emergency exists. The attack on the Barrier must be abandoned. The fleet and all the resources of the Black Star will be placed at Captain Clayton’s disposal, for the task of averting disaster. With your own telescopes, you can confirm Dr. Winston’s discovery that the Moon is coming back toward collision with Earth. When you have done that, come with your staff to the Lee Observatory.
A gray war rocket dropped on angular landing stanchions at the edge of the new bomb crater beside the observatory. Tony Lee, wearing an air-suit and waving a black flag, carried the message to its valve.
A long hour passed. Shane talked a little to Atlantis Lee. She was as unfrightened as her brother. Shane suddenly knew that he loved her, but it was impossible to speak of love when the shadow of disaster hung over Earth.
Two rockets dropped beside the observatory—Gluck’s Nemesis and Barlow’s Avenger. A dozen men came through the air-lock, into the observatory. Shane met them. The fierce, yellow-mustached little admiral was tense and suspicious. Barlow’s sullen face looked uneasy, defiant.
“You checked Dr. Winston’s discovery?” asked Shane.
“There is a strange object in the south.” Gluck’s small, shrewd eyes were piercing. “But your behavior has been suspicious, Clayton. Grave charges have been made against you. I am here only because I must obey the commands of the Black Star.”
“Dr. Winston is waiting in the lecture room,” Shane told him. “I want you to listen to him. Check his work all you like. Convince yourselves that the danger is real. Then we’ll talk about what to do.”
COWLING ferociously, Barlow pointed a thick finger at Shane. “Admiral, don’t trust this man! This looks like a trap. Are you going to walk into it? This man’s dealings with the known enemies of the Black Star are obvious treason. Why don’t you arrest him?”
The little admiral did not take his probing eyes off Shane.
“The Black Star,” he repeated, “commanded me to come here.”
Barlow stepped forward, one hairy hand trembling near the gun at his hip. His broad face held a look of leering triumph.
“Admiral, look at this man!” his thick voice rasped. “Is he Captain Clayton? Is he our real leader? I have evidence that he is not. When he came back from America, he didn’t even know where Clayton lived in New Dover!”
A blunt finger jabbed.
“Look at him! You can see he’s a different man. His hair is a little too dark and he’s a little too small. See, Clayton’s clothing doesn’t quite fit. Look—” Barlow stepped closer and his voice grew harsh with excitement. “Look at the scars on his face. I hadn’t noticed them before, but they are the scars of plastic surgery!” He drew his gun as he finished triumphantly. “This man is just a copy of Clayton!”
Shane grinned Clayton’s hard grin.
“Better put up your gun,” he advised Barlow. He turned to Gluck. “Admiral, I want you to listen to Dr. Winston. Then I have something to tell you.”
“Wait, Admiral!” yelped Barlow. “Are you going to allow this impostor—”
“The Black Star’s command,” Gluck shrilled. “Put up your gun, Barlow.”
An hour later, when they came out of Winston’s lecture room, the little admiral and his staff looked shaken and pale. Even Barlow appeared subdued and his pale, thick lips kept moving.
“Twenty-two days!” he whispered. “Only twenty-two days!”
With Clayton’s hard voice, Shane rapped at Gluck.
“Admiral, you are convinced of the danger?”
The stern little man tugged fiercely at his yellow mustache.
“I am convinced.” His thin voice was husky and quavering. “I have checked everything. It is more than a danger. It is a sentence of doom.” Medals tinkled as he shrugged hopelessly. “What were you going to tell me, Captain? What can the Black Star do?”
“The Black Star can do nothing alone,” Shane said gravely. “But I believe that all of us, working together, have a chance.” With a hard grin at Barlow, he confessed: “It’s true that I’m not Captain Clayton!”
The shaken men merely stared at him.
“I’m Barry Shane, an American.” Before the officers’ startled gaze, he slipped Clayton’s ring from his finger and snapped open the bezel to show the glittering star-shaped crystal. Barlow made a gasping sound, as if of rage and pain. Grinning at him, Shane gave the ring to Gluck.
“The Black Star Seal,” he told the astonished admiral. “I don’t need it any longer. Will you keep it in trust for the party?”
A STERN pride lit Gluck’s thin, old face. The suspicion vanished from his shrewd eyes. He put the ring on a gnarled finger of his right hand and looked dazedly at Shane.
“You are an American,” he quavered hopefully. “You know the science that created the Barrier.” He paused and his keen eyes probed Shane’s. “Do you know how to stop the Moon?”
“It can’t be stopped,” Shane admitted without hesitation. “But there is a way to turn it a little aside—if we can get there with the necessary equipment in time.”
“How?” demanded the admiral.
“If sufficient power is used,” Shane explained, “the space-warp wall created by an ultra-electronic tube can be made opaque to gravitation. We must set up a new Barrier around the Moon to cut it off from the Sun’s gravitation. That will change its path enough, if we can do it in time, to make it miss the Earth.”
“But we have no Barrier tube,” objected Gluck.
“There’s a spare tube in America, in the Ring Cylinder,” Shane told him. “Remember, the war is over. It will take the united efforts of all of us to avert destruction. The Americans couldn’t do anything alone. They haven’t the ships to reach the Moon, or the gold-film cells to supply the tremendous power that will be required. But America can supply the tube.”
Admiral Gluck tugged doubtfully at his yellow mustache. He wasn’t used to the idea of Americans as allies.
Two days later the Nemesis landed at Ring City. Shane introduced the little admiral to General Whitehall. The bulky crates that contained the parts of the spare ultradyne tube were loaded without delay.
“The tube wasn’t designed for a gravitational shield,” Whitehall warned Shane. “You will have to overload it about a hundred times. I don’t know how long it will hold out—perhaps a few minutes,-perhaps long enough. If we only had time to build another—”
But there was no time.
The Nemesis flashed out through the Ring again, to overtake the rocket fleet already bound for the Moon, loaded with gold-film cells. After six days the fleet reached the returning satellite. The long cylinders dropped to form a ring on the cragged floor of a vast ice-crater.
With a crew of men in air-suits, Barry Shane assembled the tube in the center of that ring. The six-armed tube was shaped somewhat like one of the pick-up toys called jacks that young girls still played with. But it rose seventy feet high, hung in a steel tower. Thick cables connected it to the power rooms of the rockets ringed about it.
At last, after sixty sleepless hours, the job was finished. Reeling with weariness, Shane gave a signal. A river of power came through the cables from the ships. The transparent quartz arms of the great tube glowed faintly green.
OVER the cragged ice-peaks of the wild moonscape, the dark splendor of space appeared unchanged. The Earth was like another strange Moon—brown and bare, except for the sharp-edged greenish circle of America, inside the Ring. Not even a flicker passed across that dark, strange sky.
Presently a signal came from the navigation room of the Nemesis. The Moon had ceased its slow curve toward the Sun—and toward collision with Earth. The tube was working!
But would it burn out?
Weary as he was, Shane couldn’t take his eyes off that pale green glow in the great arms that now meant the chance of the world to survive. It remained steady for minute after minute, hour after hour, until Shane went to sleep on his feet.
Anxious days went by. The brown, barren Earth grew vaster in the heavens and still the overloaded tube endured. The Moon reached the point of closest approach. The desolate Earth filled the lunar sky. In a few more hours the Moon would have been safely past.
But the reaction of Earth’s gravitational stresses increased the overload. The tube flickered and went dark. The invisible gravity wall was gone. The terrific power of gravitation reached the passing satellite and shattered it. Cataclysmic moonquakes tossed the ice-plain where the rocket fleet had landed. The dead tube was swallowed in a new crevasse.
The rockets fled from the doomed satellite, through space already dangerous with flying ice.
Aboard the battered Nemesis, Barry Shane watched that display of cosmic fury, his heart cold with apprehension for the safety of violet-eyed Atlantis Lee, back in New Dover. What would happen to the dome-city, under the fragments of the shattered ice-world?
Even in his concern, he realized that the spectacle had an awesome beauty. The Moon’s cragged face melted into white chaos. Two long plumes of white reached out. Slowly, as the hours passed, they stretched into a white and shining double ring about the dead, brown Earth. The Moon’s rocky core hurtled onward into space.
Finally, then, the hail of ice-fragments reached the naked, brown Earth. The heat of impact turned them into expanding steam. The barren planet was splotched with white. The splotches grew and ran together, until the planet’s face was veiled in white.
Only the misty greenish circle over North America remained unchanged. Under the shelter of the Ring, America had escaped all harm, but white clouds hid the fate of the cities of New Britain in the unprotected, exposed Outside.
Despairing for Atlantis Lee’s life, Barry Shane found it difficult to live up to the hard, cynical grin he had so willingly assumed.
CHAPTER XX
Gateway to Paradise
A MAN and a woman, alone in a broken machine on the dead, dry, skeleton-strewn waste where once the sea had been, waited for the end of the world. Under the skilful care of Della Rand, Clayton recovered from the effects of the bullet she had fired. He continued his observations of the approaching object in the southern sky and found it was not the returning Dwarf.
It was Earth’s old, lost Moon, but that fact seemed to make no difference. Night by night the returning satellite loomed larger and more ominous in the circular screen of the powerful electronic telescope. Clayton also watched the sky for the ion-glow of any passing rocket.
“I’m going to signal a ship,” he told Della, “whenever one comes in sight. The ship’s lights should attract attention, if we open all the shutters and wink them.”
Della’s gaze was searching, almost hostile.
“Why?” she demanded, her voice cold with scorn. “Do you want to go back, to rejoin your friends in the Black Star? Do you want to expose Barry Shane and start a new attack on the Ring?”
Clayton laughed and put his arm around her.
“Are you trying to start a fight, beautiful?”
“I won’t let you go back, if that’s what you want to do!”
“Forgive me, darling,” he said, his face grave and oddly tender. “I don’t blame you for thinking that about me. I’ve given you cause enough. But things are different now, beautiful. You’ve made them different.”
Wonderingly she scrutinized his features. He smiled back at her—a little smile that seemed strangely abashed and diffident. The hard, reckless glint of his green eyes had vanished, grown soft.
She waited bewilderedly, silent in his arms.
“I remember something I read in an old book,” he said slowly, “one of the few books that were saved after the Dwarf passed. It said something about the gateway to paradise. We in the Black Star have been knocking on the wrong gate. You’ve helped me find the right one, beautiful.”
His arms drew her closer and he kissed her gently.
“I want to go back and help Barry Shane,” he continued. “The trap was waiting for him. I knew that Barlow had already set it. It was amusing to let Shane walk into it—amusing, then, because you hadn’t shown me the proper gate. I suppose it won’t make any difference in the end, but I’d like to do what I can to repair a little of the harm I’ve done. Besides—”
He laughed and the old hard glint came back to his eyes.
“Besides,” he repeated, “if Captain Barlow has already sprung his trap, I’d like to see him face to face with the ghost of the man he murdered!”
“I wonder, have you really changed?” whispered Della Rand.
They watched the dark skies for a rocket’s passing glare, but no ship passed. Slow disappointment grew upon Clayton’s face.
“There seem to be no patrol flights any more,” he said at last. “Gluck must have moved the fleet from Point Fourteen.” He grinned at her. “I guess we’ll see the end together after all, beautiful.”
“I’m glad,” she whispered in his arms.
Night by night they watched the Moon.
Growing on the telescope screen, it showed a face that Earth had never seen before. But the other side of the Moon was only another crater-pitted wilderness of jagged, glaring ice.
“Just a big snowball, beautiful!”
CLAYTON grinned at Della Rand and his hard green eyes seemed unafraid.
“How is that?” she breathed. “That’s all the old explorers found, two hundred years ago.” He adjusted the instrument and the Moon’s cruel, white features grew upon the screen. “Just a hard snowball, molded on a core of rock. A cosmic prank on the human race!”
A day came when the telescope was no longer necessary. The terrible Moon grew larger than the Sun. Its savage ice-mountains were visible to the unaided eye. Della Rand thought they were like the spikes in some ancient war-club, glimpsed by a victim as the weapon descended.
