Collected Short Fiction, page 460
There was no need for caution now—for anything but haste. The thick iron cylinder was almost weightless here, but still its mass of many tons made it slow and difficult to move. He hauled it laboriously over the shaft, and started it home with all the thrust of his flying armor’s drive.
It was wadding for his rocket gun. It would hold back the fury of the contraterrene charge, make sure that it didn’t blow itself out of the shaft before it had been fused and vaporized and utterly consumed, to release its full atomic might. And its impact would certainly be enough to crush the suspended charge into ignition.
For good measure, however, he dropped another core after the first—he thought he had time enough for that. Then he fled out of the glowing funnel—chance had shaped it well enough, he thought, into the bell-flare of an efficient rocket muzzle—and retreated over the near horizon.
He had time to reach the asteroid’s lee. He found the Good-by Jane, standing at anchor in an iron-walled hollow. The photophone greeted him, with a red and anxious flicker. But he had no time to listen or to answer. He dived headlong for the open air lock.
But it came, before he could get aboard. Even as he dropped down upon the iron his feet could feel a mighty and soundless vibration. Desperately gripping the edges of the open valve, he crouched against the rusty hull. However, he couldn’t resist the temptation to risk his eyes with a glance at the sky—for this rock was his laboratory.
Still there was no sound. Beyond the ship and the iron cliffs, however, a white and mighty plume came up. It was magnificent and blinding. It flooded the sky and drowned the Sun. Drake bent his helmet, to shield his eyes against the deluge of terrible radiation.
He heard a sighing, as if a thin wind passed. The living iron quivered under him. Something tugged at his armor. He clung desperately to the valve. A hail of freezing iron rattled against his back and he felt a parching heat.
And then it was over.
Silence came back, an insulating ocean. He dared to look again, and his dazzled eyes saw a sky of fading red—a veil of dull flame that ripped and came to shreds and swiftly dissolved from before the black, eternal face of spatial night. The storm of iron was gone, and the Sun came back.
An awed and weary giant, Drake stumbled into the air lock. He shut the outer valve behind him, and heard the grateful hiss of air, and struggled hastily out of his hot armor. A numbed and heavy giant, he mounted the ladder to the pilothouse. Before he had time to speak, Ann made him bare his gaunt forearm for a routine antigamma injection. Rob McGee gave him the astrogator’s stool, and it felt good to sit down. With a hoarse and anxious voice, he gasped:
“Was the orbit changed—enough?”
He knew that the energy of annihilated matter must have fused and boiled and expelled thousands of tons of nickel-iron, to make that stupendous rocket jet. It had been timed well enough to react at right angles to the orbit.
Drake himself had no way of telling what he had accomplished without spending laborious hours with the instruments and the methods that Earth-born man had invented to extend the range of feeble senses never adapted to space. But he knew that any change would be self-evident to Rob McGee, as obvious as one plus one.
“Was it changed?” McGee turned nimbly from the periscope with a gentle smile creased into his leather face. “About a hundred times as much as necessary!”
Ann clapped her hands together. “Then Freedonia’s ours!”
“I don’t know.” The victorious giant was doubtful. “We’ve moved the rock, but the title to it is a thing to be settled by the officers of the Guard and the lawyers and politicians at Pallasport—and they’re all about as tricky as seetee itself.”
The first brief elation was ebbing, and the reaction of effort and strain came back upon him in crushing fatigue. All the buoyant force of that mighty purpose was drained out of him. He was old again. But still the job wasn’t done.
“Can you get von Sudenhorst?” A slow, heavy giant, he turned to Rob McGee. “We must report what we’ve done. The change in the orbit doesn’t mean a thing, unless they know we did it.”
Hours later, still too tense and tired to sleep, Drake was resting on the bunk in Rob McGee’s cabin, when the photophone picked up the cruiser. Quietly, Rob McGee reported how they had moved Freedonia. And Ann relented enough to speak to Kurt von Sudenhorst—for she no longer felt afraid. Drake heard her voice, through the open ladder well.
“Oh, yes, Kurt, we’re all safe. . . . Of course we did—can’t you see how much it’s changed? . . . Didn’t Captain McGee just tell you how we did it? . . . That’s the way it was. Mr. Drake used the shaft for a rocket motor, and about five tons of contraterrene iron for fuel. . . . Of course it made a thousand-kilometer jet, and altered the orbit very suddenly! What else would you expect? . . . Certainly! Mr. Drake always said there was power in seetee. You don’t seem to realize it, Kurt, but you have just seen a historic event—the first successful use of contraterrene matter. Now seetee is going to make a lot of changes—just wait and see! . . . And this report will say we were successful? . . . Don’t be stupid, Kurt! We changed the orbit, didn’t we? We averted the collision. That’s all the notice of intention said we were going to do. . . . Of course you’ll do your duty, Kurt. That’s all we want . . . Naturally you can’t grant us the title. That’s up to the claims office, in Pallasport. . . . Then good-by, Kurt. . . . Yes. we’re coming back to Obania. . . . No, I’m afraid not. . . . No. . . . Good-by!”
By that time the fire storm had completely ceased. They stayed on the asteroid long enough to salvage the undamaged supplies and equipment from the battered camp. McGee found one of the iron cores from the shaft, and towed it to a high point near the smoking, glowing pit. They welded it upright there, for a legal monument, and posted upon it a copy of the notice of intention. Ann herself took green fluorescent paint to splash it with tall, hopeful letters, spelling Freedonia.
The return to Obania took only sixteen hours, for it was not so distant now. Drake slept a dozen hours. He rose once more a giant, lifted with the triumph of his purpose. He couldn’t see into the future. He had no way of knowing how long the real conquest of contraterrene matter would take, or who would be the final victor. But he knew that his old dream had turned a page of history. The moving of Freedonia had opened a new era.
The Guard cruiser had returned to the base on Obania, long ahead of them. As the Good-by Jane came in to land on the tiny, convex field, the photophone flashed above the control tower, announcing that Drake was requested to call at Commander von Sudenhorst’s office, immediately.
A few young guardsmen, off duty, gathered about the lock of the rusty little tug. Perhaps the most of them were interested in nothing more than another glimpse of Ann. But all of them had heard what Drake had done, and he could see a difference in their glances. He was now a little more than the old, hopeless dreamer.
Kurt von Sudenhorst, however, was blind to any change. Nothing short of annihilation, it seemed, could ever penetrate the smug completeness of his ordered military world. In the metal precision of his office, he received Drake with the same stiff and arrogant formality.
“Commander, you wanted me to call?”
Sitting erect behind the cold polish of his chromium desk, von Sudenhorst reached for one of the papers that reposed in strict military rows, and looked up at Drake with hard blank eyes. His flat voice lifted, as if giving a command.
“Mr. Drake, my report of your unexpected success in safely altering the collision orbit of HSM T-89-AK-44 has been duly made to Pallasport. I have received a reply. The Guard has been instructed by the Mandate claims office to inform you and Captain McGee, acting as the legal agents of Mr. Bruce O’Banion, that your claim to said asteroid has been recognized, in consequence of your service. The title will be granted to you.”
Drake swayed a little, gulping, “Thank you, commander!”
“No thanks are necessary,” von Sudenhorst told him shortly. “I am merely acting in the line of duty.” His stiff face frowned, and he caught his breath as if to add something else. But his iron jaw closed, and he rose like a black automaton. “That is all, Mr. Drake. I understand that Pallasport is calling you, if you will go to the photophone office.”
Drake thanked him again, out of habit, and hurried to receive his call. Seated in the little booth, he waited breathlessly. It took an endless minute for his voice to span the eighteen million kilometers to Pallasport, to say that he was ready. The light-winged reply took another eternal minute before he heard the eager, slightly incoherent voice of Rick:
“Hello, dad! I’ve just heard about it, and I think it’s wonderful—what you did, I mean. You’ve showed the System that you were right about seetee, all the time. As for me, I wish I had seen it sooner—I mean, when I came back to the Mandate, and went to work for Interplanet.”
His deep young voice hurried on, filling up the two precious minutes: “But what I called to tell you, dad—I’m through with Interplanet. I guess you were right about them. They won’t let me do anything—real, I mean, and big—like terraforming Pallas. And it made me plenty sore the way they kept Cap’n Rob from getting that unit.”
Tears stung Drake’s hollow eyes, and he heard the quick, eager voice through a sudden distant roaring in his ears. “I hear you’ve got title to the asteroid, dad. I’m awfully glad. Say, dad—Cap’n Rob told me you wanted the rock to use for a seetee lab. I want to come out and help you build it—I mean, if you still want me. How about it, dad?”
Rick’s two minutes were gone. Alone in the stuffy little booth, Drake was suddenly weak and trembling. There was a roaring in his ears. At first he didn’t hear the operator say that he could speak. He wasted half a precious minute. Then his voice came queer and hoarse—but still he managed to tell Rick how about it.
A tall and mighty giant, years lifted from him with the power of his proven dream, Drake strode back to the rusty little office in the town. Things were going to be different, now. They would need a new sign, now, with Rick’s name on it. Seetee was doomed to yield at last, to the spatial engineers.
The next evening, Ann O’Banion gave a modest little banquet in the long glass-and-silver dining room of her father’s ancient mansion. It was to celebrate the winning of Freedonia. She even asked Kurt von Sudenhorst, out of sheer elation. But old Jim Drake forgot to come. He was busy at his desk, designing the induction furnace and magnetic hammer with which he hoped to make the first successful forging of contraterrene iron.
THE END.
The Alien Intelligence
Dr. Austen Rises to Confront a Supreme Crisis as Winfield Fowler Meets the Krimlu Face to Face!
CONCLUDING INSTALLMENT
What Has Happened Before
JR. WINFIELD FOWLER, young American physician, sets out in response to an urgent radio message in search of his friend, Dr. Horace Austen who has disappeared in the hinterland of Australia. Fowler reaches a weird mesa in the heart of the desert which is really a hollowed-out mountain.
He, crosses over and finds a crystal city inhabited by men in shining armor. He meets a girl, Melvar, and her brother. Naro, who have a letter for him from Dr. Austen.
Austen has left the crystal city to penetrate deeper into the mysterious region beyond a silver lake from whence come flashing lights, ruining comets and whistling sounds. He wants to understand the Purple Ones, humanlike ghouls that roam the wilds and are apparently indestructible.
Austen ends his letter by stating that he thinks the supernatural manifestations result from natural forces In the control of an intelligent power that might not be too far beyond mankind’s own state of advancement.
With Melvar and Naro, Dr. Fowler follows in his elderly friend’s footsteps. After incredible adventure and hardship in which they see phenomena they cannot understand, have a battle with Purple Ones, and discover that the rushing comets are really some sort of rocket ship belonging to the Krimlu, they encounter a metallic being emerging from a landed ship and by a lucky shot destroy it by an explosion.
They gain the ship, learn to operate it, and fly deeper into the danger zone, to make a crash landing in the heart of a carboniferous forest.
Leaving the strange craft, they find evidences of human labor in building a forge and crudely smelting ore, and they follow the trail until they reach the camp that Dr. Austen has set up in the wilderness.
They advance on the apparently deserted site, and Fowler shouts fearfully, “Dr. Austen, are you here?”
Now Go on with the Story
For answer, the man himself appeared in the rude doorway of the hut. His clothing was tattered beyond description, and he looked very worn and thin. There were lines of age and care about his wrinkled face. But his hair was neatly brushed, and he had just been shaving, for his safety razor was in his hand. A smile of astonishment and incredulous joy sprang over his face. For a moment he was speechless. Then the old familiar voice called out uncertainly, almost sobbing with joy.
“Winfield! Melvar! Naro! Can it really be you? At last!”
Then, as if he were a little ashamed of the feeling he had shown, he pulled out his pipe and began to try to fill it, his fingers trembling with emotion. But Melvar sprang to him and threw her arms about him in a way that gave me a momentary pang of jealousy. He stuck the pipe back in his pocket, grinning awkwardly in a way that tightened the strings of my heart.
“I forgot,” he said. “My tobacco was all gone a week ago.”
I shook his hand. Then Naro placed his palm upon Austen’s shoulder in the customary greeting of Astran.
“I’d almost given up,” the old man said. “Our world is so far away that it seems unreal. After I had sent the wireless call a few times the devilish rustling in the sky got too close for comfort. Realizing that the hissing red lights, whatever they are, were about to locate me by the signals, I quit that. Tell me how you got here.”
I told him briefly about the red ship.
“Yes, I knew that the things were ships of some kind,” he said when I had finished. “I have been working on the quicksilver stuff, and making a few exploring trips. I have discovered several things. I had to work endlessly to keep from going mad. Then I would shave, and try to clean up like a civilized man. And I kept repeating all the poetry I knew. That helped a lot. You’ve no idea how glad I am to see you. Did you bring the spectroscope and tubes?”
BY THE way of reply I took off the pack that contained them. Austen began to open it with as much enthusiasm as a small boy investigating a Christmas present. Suddenly he paused and looked at us. “But you don’t look like you’ve had any holiday yourselves.”
“It hasn’t been a holiday at all,” I answered. “Do you happen to have any coffee left? I left mine in the tent outside the cliffs.”
“How about a little hot Mulligan stew to go with it?” he grinned, beckoning the way inside.
We entered the cabin. Most of the room was devoted to Austen’s crude laboratory equipment. On one of his benches were several roughly modeled pottery jars filled with the liquid from the Silver Sea. His bunk was in a screened-off corner.
In a few minutes he had the coffee-pot boiling over a charcoal brazier. While he prepared a meal consisting of a pot of steaming soup made of the yellow fruits cooked with the tender roots of the red plant we gave him an account of our adventures. When we had eaten, Melvar retired to Austen’s bunk, and Naro and I lay down on a blanket on the laboratory floor. I went to sleep at once. Austen assured me later that I slept for thirty-seven hours.
At any rate, when I got up I felt like a new man. Austen had set up the apparatus we had brought. He had a test tube full of the silver liquid set up in a beam of X-rays, the spectroscope in position to examine the dense purple gas that was rising from the stuff.
“How is it coming?” I asked him.
He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have a theory, but it doesn’t seem to work out right. The key is in sight, but it always eludes me. There is vast energy stored in the silver liquid. It may be that that amazing thing in the sky stores the energy of sunlight in the stuff, something over one horsepower for each square yard on which it falls. Or perhaps the atomic energy of the gases in the air is released. If I had the key I could make the silver stuff go off like ten times its weight of T.N.T.”
“Do you think,” I asked him eagerly, “that you could set off some of it and wipe out the Krimlu?”
“Winfield,” the old scientist soberly replied, “even if you could, would you wipe out a whole civilization with a science great enough to make the Silver Lake—a culture equal to, if not above, that of our own world?”
“Yes,” I cried. “If you had seen those purple things—men and women who are old and hideous and fearfully strong and malignant—you couldn’t move too quickly to blot them off the earth.”
“I have seen,” he said seriously. “And the purple monsters are terrible enough. But they are not the masters. They are but the servants, or perhaps I should say the machines, of a higher power. I told you that I had been exploring a bit. I have seen some strange things.
“There is another form of intelligence here, Winfield—a form of life unrelated to humanity, without any sympathy for mankind, with no share of human feelings. Perhaps it is a danger to the human race. The things would not hesitate, I suppose, to use all humanity as they have used the people of Astran. But that does not solve the problem.
“Would it be right to wipe them out? Perhaps it would be better for mankind to go under. Perhaps they are superior to us. The purposes of the creation of intelligent life might be better met by these things than by man. I have given it a great deal of thought, and I can’t decide.”
He fell silent.
“You say there is another form of life here. What is it like?” I asked.
