Collected Short Fiction, page 442
Dread created numbness in her brain. She tried to find small tasks about their cramped quarters in the disabled Friendship to occupy her mind, but all the business of life had lost its meaning now. She was glad to be with Clayton, yet all her love seemed always to turn into fear of the moment when he would be gone, with all the doomed world. She looked up dully as he came into the galley.
His brown face looked perplexed. For once, he seemed too disturbed to grin.
“I said it was all a joke. Now the Moon is playing another prank. It has left its orbit!”
Her dark eyes went black, staring at him. Her strong, slender hands caught suddenly at her throat. The pang of hope was more painful than despair had been.
“What do you mean?” she gasped. Clayton recovered his grin.
“The Moon isn’t following quite the orbit I predicted,” he told her, “though the difference isn’t great. An error, I suppose, in my calculations. I can’t figure it out. I checked them a dozen times.”
“Will it miss us?” she whispered anxiously.
He shrugged. “Too soon to say, beautiful. Not much, at the best. Just a graze, perhaps, instead of the center shot I predicted. Probably not enough to make any difference.” His hard fingers caught her trembling arm and she found comfort in his strength. “Want to have a look?”
Hour by hour the Moon expanded, until it blotted out the stars. Its rays flooded the dead sea-floor with a cold, strange radiance. Its awesome, mountainous disk became the only reality.
Della Rand tried not to look at it. Again and again she left the ports to begin some useless task of sweeping or setting their living quarters in order. But always the appalling spectacle drew her back unwillingly.
Clayton seemed scarcely disturbed. He grinned at her visible apprehension. Sometimes it seemed to her that he felt a strange elation on this terrifying spectacle of cosmic catastrophe.
SHE fixed a tray of food in the little galley and brought it to him, but of course neither of them could eat. He finished a new set of observations and his calm, brown fingers solved one more problem on the calculator.
“What—” Della gulped. “What have you found?”
“Things are going to be interesting, beautiful.” His green eyes held the old reckless glint. “It’s going to miss us, but not by very much. It’s going to pass inside the critical distance of four radii.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he replied. “Theory says the Moon should be broken up by tidal stresses, inside the critical distance. The rocky core might go on past, but I imagine most of the ice will be peeled off of it. I think we’re going to have a hail-storm, beautiful—a hail-storm like none there ever was before.” He swept her into his hard arms and kissed her. “Whatever happens, things are going to be interesting.”
They watched the end of a world.
Huge beyond imagination, cruel with mountain-fangs of glaring ice, the Moon filled the southward sky. The battle of cosmic energies made a spectacle such as man had never seen. Della felt numb and ill with dread, but Clayton’s greenish eyes were bright and his hard, brown face had a faint, eager smile.
Ice-crags shattered on the Moon. Tidal strains ripped new black fissures across the craters, wider and longer than the snow-filled cracks that once had spread their mysterious web from the meteor-shattered crater named Tycho.
The Moon dissolved into white chaos. The stricken satellite shuddered and spun. Gleaming plumes of debris were flung across the sky’s black face, yet the cataclysm had the stately deliberation fitting to a planet’s death.
It was like a picture in slow motion. Time was suspended. Eyes ached and necks were cramped and still the watchers dared not look away, for no man had ever seen the death of a world.
They had lost the track of time. Hours must have passed. The rays of the rising Sun picked out the first jagged fragment of the shattered world falling near them. Clayton pointed and caught Della’s cold hand.
They watched silently. The cragged missile struck a distant line of dead, brown hills. The dry ocean-bed rocked to the impact. Della’s forgotten tray of dishes fell and shattered on the floor.
Steam exploded from the point of impact. White vapor filled the sky and veiled the crumbling Moon.
“Now what will happen?” Della’s cold hand was tense in Clayton’s. “To the Earth?” Her dark eyes searched his face anxiously. “And to us?”
“Too soon to say, beautiful,” Clayton told her. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
* * * * *
IT was two days before the ice-battered fleet could return to the white-ringed Earth. By that time the clouds had begun to clear from the lake-jeweled uplands. Still a soft haze veiled the brown mountains that had been so stark and bare.
“That’s more than water-vapor,” Shane told Admiral Gluck. “The Moon must have caught a part of our lost air as it was drawn between Earth and the Dwarf. Just a fraction, of course, but it might be fairly dense in the old sea-bottoms.”
The watch-officer of the Nemesis caught a flashing signal light. Dropping to investigate, the rocket found the jagged, brown hull of the disguised Friendship, lying on the shore of a new shallow sea.
Della Rand and Clayton came running hand in hand to greet their rescuers. They were breathing fast in the thin air, but they needed no air-suits.
Clayton met Shane with a hard green-eyed grin.
“Congratulations, Captain Clayton,” Clayton said. “Good work! You can keep the name, if you like. I have something else.” He looked at the dark-eyed girl and the hardness went out of his grin. “We’ve found something else,” he repeated softly. “I have found a gateway and Della has found a dream.”
Shane grinned back.
“I’m not using the name. Thanks, anyhow.”
Two hours later the rocket dropped through the thinning white ceiling over New Dover. Now the gray dome-city stood upon the end of a long rugged headland. A new sea washed the black cliffs beneath it.
The Nemesis landed upon the level top of the dome. The city was unharmed, for the returning atmosphere had cushioned Earth from the hail of icy debris. A cheering crowd surrounded the battered rocket. Shane glimpsed the bare red head of Atlantis Lee and went out to find her.
“Barry!” she called to him.
The sky had cleared and across it soared the white eternal arch of the ring around the Earth. It was man’s own arch of victory in a battle with the cosmos.
“See, Barry!” Atlantis Lee turned gently in Shane’s hard arms and pointed to the soaring pillars of the double ring. “Aren’t they like a splendid gateway?”
Backlash
Sometimes it isn’t the best possible idea to go back in time and have your enemy killed. That can make things even worse—
NOW the blizzard had died to a fitful wailing. The aurora shimmered through a dark haze of wind-driven ice crystals. Drifted snow covered half the grounded rocket. Frost cracked sharply in the tiny cabin, and the girl woke.
Challis, cramped with chili in the pilot seat, thought she could have been beautiful. But her pinched face had the blue pallor of the concentration camps, and her thin body was shapeless in the shoddy gray of the New State labor battalions.
She sat up quickly, stiff with sleep, yet somehow graceful. Challis wondered what would happen when she met Captain Dent. Vic Dent was his friend, but a handsome devil, too. And there were few unattached women in the Pantechnicon.
She went tense, shuddering.
“Cold, Nadya?” asked the lean American.
“The Yellow Guards”—her dark eyes flicked past him, quick and wary as the eyes of some hunted animal—“I thought I heard them.” She peered anxiously through a frost-rimmed port, into the thick antarctic twilight. “Can they find us?”
“I don’t think so.” With a comforting grin, Challis opened a thermos jug. “We’re lucky the blizzard struck. That was three thousand miles behind. Levin’s yellow devils probably think we went down in the sea. So cheer up, kid.” He splashed smoking tea into a paper cup. “Forget your Russian gloom.”
Her haunted eyes were huge and liquid in her starved pale face.
“How can I?” whispered Nadya Stanislav. “You were splendid, to take me away from the labor camp—I don’t know how you ever found me. But what’s the use?” Her thin shoulders shrugged in the gray. “Where can we go? Levin rules all the world. There’s nowhere left.”
“My beautiful, hopeless Rahshyan!” The tanned rocket pilot grinned cheerfully. “Drink your tea.”
She took one obedient sip.
“Father came from Russia, but I’m American,” she protested gravely, “and there’s nothing to be gay about. There’s no more America. Levin’s New State is a dark monster that has swallowed all the world.”
The face of Challis went bleak and hard.
“Even America.” His voice was flat and dull. “I was over Chicago, in a rocket fighter, when the Eurasians dropped the first uranatomic bombs. You can’t imagine—it was hell—”
He shut his eyes in a useless effort to shut out all the past, and made his hard face smile again. “But now we are free, Nadya,” he went on huskily. “We must forget all that’s happened—everything but the Pantechnicon.”
Sleep was soft again in her deep, throaty voice:
“Pantechnicon—what is that?”
“The Pantechnicon is where we’re going,” he told her. “We can be there in an hour now. I couldn’t tell you before, Nadya—your father’s there.”
“Father!” Her big eyes were staring and black. “They told me he had been—liquidated.” She caught her breath. “Why couldn’t you tell me?”
“The Yellow Guards were too close behind, until the blizzard struck,” he said. “I thought one of us was enough to take the secret into their little Inquisition, in case we got caught. Understand?”
Biting her white lower lip, she nodded silently.
“The Pantechnicon has no defenses except secrecy,” he added. “If Levin ever suspect that it exists, that will be the end of everything. The Yellow Guards would scour the world to find us. A single uranatomic bomb could wipe us out—and blot out the last chance on Earth for our kind of life.”
“My father?” Her huge eyes were still dark and bewildered; tears rolled out of them. “He’s—here?”
“This is one continent where Levin isn’t dictator.” Challis gestured at the rugged wilderness of ice, dark and hostile under the veil of flying drift. The dying blizzard still made a hollow wailing against the rocket nozzles. “Here the only rulers are winter and night and death.”
UNCONSCIOUSLY, Nadya drew the shoddy gray closer to her throat.
“They’re kinder than the Yellow Guards.” Challis turned up the silent electric heater and made a cheerful grin. “Years ago, when we saw the totalitarian storm sweeping the world, we planned the Pantechnicon to protect one seed of civilization.” He gestured toward the freezing dark.
“It’s hidden here. A scientific Shangri La, to be a lamp of culture through the dark age ahead. I had money enough to pay for it. I found people I could trust. The job wasn’t easy. We had to keep it secret, and Levin moved faster than we expected. But we did it.”
A tear splashed into Nadya’s cup. “And father’s here?”
“We got Dr. Stanislav out of a Yellow Guard prison four years ago,” Challis told her. “He was one scientist we had to save because his work wasn’t finished. Probably you know what he had begun?”
Nadya shook her head.
“I was a war nurse, and then counterespionage. It’s seven years since I saw him.”
“The greatest discovery since the uranatomic generator.” His voice lifted with enthusiasm. “He has found a whole new science. Infra-gravities, he calls it. The forces in the strange borderland between electromagnetics and gravitation. He has done things that will amaze you.” Challis grinned at her.
“You didn’t know we came to see you in the prison camp?”
Nadya caught her breath, and her big eyes went dark with bewildered wonder.
“Dr. Stanislav has built a projection cell,” Challis told her. “I don’t quite follow the mathematics. But he bends space somehow with an infra-gravitic field. So that you can look across the fold into a place maybe half around the world. That’s how we found you, and studied the prison routine to plan the escape.”
His brown grin broke her frozen astonishment.
“For all we know,” he finished, “your father and Captain Dent may be watching us this moment.”
Her dark eyes looked around the tiny cabin uncertainly.
“Who’s Captain Dent?”
“Vic Dent was a rocket ordnance expert until America fell,” he said. “He helped me plan the Pantechnicon and flew in many a rocket load of equipment himself. Now that job’s done, he’s your father’s research assistant.” His grin turned mock ferocious. “Even if Vic is my friend—I warn you.”
Her big eyes stared a solemn protest.
“How can we be gay while Levin rules the world?”
“My tragic, lovely Rahshyan.” He blew her a cheerful kiss. “Wait till we’re safe in the Pantechnicon.”
“I’m not Russian, and we’ll never be safe.” Shivering, she stared into the snow-driven dark. “Nobody ever is safe. The Yellow Guards never give up.”
His gray eyes were sympathetic.
“Sometimes it’s harder to escape from their memory than it is from the Guards. But let’s go.” He started the throbbing injectors. “The Pantechnicon is another world.”
A CRASHING BLAST broke the rocket free of the grasping frost. It leaped into the flying drift. The aurora shimmered pale across the stars. Surely, Challis told himself, they would never be discovered. Levin wouldn’t trust explorers this far beyond the reach of the Yellow Guards.
At last Challis pointed, shouting above roaring jets:
“There it is!”
Clouds and drift made a ghostly floor ahead. Naked black mountains lifted out of it, cut a jagged line against the pale aurora. A thin gray wisp trailed from the lip of a lofty volcanic cup.
That cloud wisp was all that might betray the Pantechnicon. He thought no chance rocket pilot was apt to guess its meaning. There were live volcanoes in Antarctica. The mountain’s flanks were too steep to be scaled on foot in these incessant blizzards, and it would take a brave man to dive blindly into that cloud-filled cone.
Nadya was staring, eyes bright with excitement.
Challis grinned at her and dropped the rocket into the black-walled cup. The dense fog of condensation cut his vision to a few yards, and he snapped on the klystron feeler beams.
For a moment the fog was lit with the blue shimmer of the Nordholm field. Damping out convection currents, the field held in place the insulating cloud that protected the crater from the savage cold above.
The rocket dropped below the ceiling, and Nadya saw the Pantechnicon. Challis heard her breathless cry and turned from the controls. Elation had colored her thin face. He knew that she was beautiful.
He landed on the narrow runway blasted out of the cragged north slope. Nadya hastily powdered her nose as he unsealed the valve. They climbed out, and Challis waved at the sentry in front of the hangar cut into the black cliffs.
“Only one man with a pistol?” Nadya was astonished. “Against all the Yellow Guards?”
“If they find us,” Challis said, “nothing is going to help.”
From the runway’s edge they looked down across the Pantechnicon. The gray cloud roof floated between sheer basaltic walls. Red cattle grazed green meadows on the flat crater floor. A crawling tractor combine was harvesting yellow wheat. Young trees stood softly green along the quiet streets of a red-tiled village. Clear as bells, the voices of children playing ball came up to the high runway.
“Such peace,” whispered Nadya. “It can’t be real!”
Challis saw her tears, and his voice went matter-of-fact.
“Vaults are cut in the mountain under our feet,” he said. “They are filled with the books that Levin has been burning. Our museums contain all the art treasures add scientific equipment we had time to gather.”
“We have a few scientists—such as your father. Doctors, artists, engineers. But more of us are just plain common people, farmers and mechanics, carpenters and miners and printers. A couple of hundred, altogether; enough to be a permanent nucleus of civilization.”
Nadya gulped back a sob.
“It’s all so happy,” she whispered. “So bright and warm and quiet. Just like a peaceful country village!” She saw the American flag flying over the schoolyard where the children shouted, and saluted solemnly. “You don’t know what that flag means to me.” Her voice was choked. “Not unless you’ve had to kneel in the mud to Levin’s lightning banner.”
Challis looked away from her wet face; tears made him uncomfortable. He gestured across the bright floor of the black-walled valley.
“Indirect lighting,” he said. “New-type fluorescent tubes, powered from the uranatomic generator. The volcanic soil is rich enough to grow five or six crops a year. Besides, the hydroponic gardens—”
“Forgive me for going soppy,” Nadya dried her eyes. “Let’s find my father.”
“His lab is in Pantechnicon Tower,” Challis pointed at a tall, graceful building beyond the red-tiled town. “See the silver bubble on the roof? That’s his projection cell that we used to find you.”
WITH A casual greeting to the sentry, Challis led her down a long ramp. Hibiscus splashed huge red blooms beside them, and a mockingbird trilled. A silent electric car stopped at the foot of the ramp, and a tall man got out.
“Vic Dent,” Challis murmured. “I warned out.”
“I heard your jets, Challis.” White teeth smiled out of Dent’s brown, handsome face. He wore grease-spotted coveralls like an officer’s uniform. Shaking hands with Challis, he spoke to Nadya. “Welcome, darling. We expected you a week ago.”
“Yellow Guard trouble,” Challis said, “Nadya wants to see her father.”
