Collected Short Fiction, page 57
“I have a season. Trainor’s Tower was built for a purpose. That purpose is going to require some publicity very shortly. You are better able to supply that publicity than any other man in the world.”
“I can do it—provided——”
“I am sure that our cause is one that will enlist your enthusiastic support. You will be asked to do nothing dishonorable.”
Mr. Cain took a thin white card from his pocket, scrawled rapidly upon it, and handed it to Bill, who read the words, “Admit bearer. Cain.”
“Present that at the elevator, at eight tonight. Ask to be taken to Dr. Trainor.”
Mr. Cain walked rapidly away, with his lithe, springy step, leaving Bill standing, looking at the card, rather astounded.
At eight that night, a surprised guard let Bill into the waiting room. The elevator attendant looked at the card.
“Yes. Dr. Trainor is up in the observatory.”
The car shot up, carrying Bill on the longest vertical trip on earth. It was minutes before the lights on the many floors of the cylindrical building atop the tower were flashing past them. The elevator stopped. The door swung open, and Bill stepped out beneath the crystal dome of an astronomical observatory.
He was on the very top of Trainor’s Tower.
The hot stars shone, hard and clear, through a metal-ribbed dome of polished vitrolite. Through the lower panels of the transparent wall, Bill could see the city spread below him—a mosaic of fine points of light, scattered with the colored winking eyes of electric signs; it was so far below that it seemed a city in miniature.
Slanting through the crystal dome was the huge black barrel of a telescope, with ponderous equatorial mounting. Electric motors whirred silently in its mechanism, and little lights winked about it. A man was seated at the eyepiece—he was Dr. Trainor, Bill saw—he was dwarfed by the huge size of the instrument.
There was no other person in the room, no other instrument of importance. The massive bulk of the telescope dominated it.
Trainor rose and came to meet Bill. A friendly smile spread over his placid face. Blue eyes twinkled with mild kindliness. The subdued light in the room glistened on the bald dome of his head.
“Mr. Windsor, of the Herald-Sun, I suppose?” Bill nodded, and produced a notebook. “I am very glad you came. I have something interesting to show you. Something on the planet Mars.”
“What——”
“No. No questions, please. They can wait until you see Mr. Cain again.”
Reluctantly, Bill closed his notebook. Trainor seated himself at the telescope, and Bill waited while he peered into the tube, and pressed buttons and moved bright levers. Motors whirred, and the great barrel swung about.
“Now look,” Trainor commanded.
Bill took the seat, and peered into the eyepiece. He saw a little circle of a curious luminous blue-blackness, with a smaller disk of light hanging in it, slightly swaying. The disk was an ocherous red, with darker splotches and brilliantly white polar markings.
“That is Mars—as the ordinary astronomer sees it,” Trainor said. “Now I will change eyepieces, and you will see it as no man has ever seen it except through this telescope.”
Rapidly he adjusted the great instrument, and Bill looked again.
The red disk had expanded enormously, with great increase of detail. It had become a huge red globe, with low mountains and irregularities of surface plainly visible. The prismatic polar caps stood out with glaring whiteness. Dark, green-gray patches, splotched burned orange deserts, and thin, green-black lines—the controversal “canals” of Mars—ran straight across the planet, from white caps toward the darker equatorial zone, intersecting at little round greenish dots.
“Look carefully,” Trainor said. “What do you see in the edge of the upper right quadrant, near the center of the disk and just above the equator?”
Bill peered, saw a tiny round dot of blue—it was very small, but sharply edged, perfectly round, bright against the dull red of the planet.
“I see a little blue spot.”
“I’m afraid you see the death-sentence of humanity!”
ORDINARILY Bill might have snorted—newspapermen are apt to become exceedingly skeptical. But there was something in the gravity of Trainor’s words, and in the strangeness of what he had seen through the giant telescope in the tower observatory, that made him pause.
“There’s been a lot of fiction,” Bill finally remarked, “in the last couple of hundred years. Wells’ old book, ‘The War of the Worlds,’ for example. General theory seems to be that the Martians are drying up and want to steal water. But I never really——”
“I don’t know what the motive may be,” Trainor said.
“But we know that Mars has intelligent life—the canals are proof of that. And we have excellent reason to believe that that life knows of us, and intends us no good. You remember the Enbers Expedition?”
“Yes. In 2099. Enbers was a fool who thought that if a sunship could go to the moon, it might go to Mars just as well. He must have been struck by meteorites.”
“There is no reason why Enbers might not have reached Mars in 2100,” said Trainor. “The heliographic dispatches continued until he was well over half way. There was no trouble then. We have very good reason to think that he landed, that his return was prevented by intelligent beings on Mars. We know that they are using what they learned from his captured sunship to launch an interplanetary expedition of their own!”
“And that blue spot has something to do with it?”
“We think so. But I have authority to tell you nothing more. As the situation advances, we will have need for newspaper publicity. We want you to take charge of that. Mr. Cain, of course, is in supreme charge. You will remember your word to await his permission to publish anything.”
Trainor turned again to the telescope.
With a little clatter, the elevator stopped again at the entrance door of the observatory. A slender girl ran from it across to the man at the telescope.
“My daughter Paula, Mr. Windsor,” said Trainor. Paula Trainor was an exquisite being. Her large eyes glowed with a peculiar shade of changing brown. Black hair was shingled close to her shapely head. Her face was small, elfinly beautiful, the skin almost transparent. But it was the eyes that were remarkable. In their lustrous depths sparkled mingled essence of childish innocence, intuitive, age-old wisdom, and quick intelligence—intellect that was not coldly reasonable, but effervescent, flashing to instinctively correct conclusions. It was an oddly baffling face, revealing only the mood of the moment. One could not look at it and say that its owner was good or bad, indulgent or stern, gentle or hard. It could be, if she willed, the perfect mirror of the moment’s thought—but the deep stream of her character flowed unrevealed behind it.
Bill looked at her keenly, noted all that, engraved the girl in the notebook of his memory. But in her he saw only an interesting feature story.
“Dad’s been telling you about the threatened invasion from Mars, eh?” she inquired in a low, husky voice, liquid and delicious. “The most thrilling thing, isn’t it? Aren’t we lucky to know about it, and to be in the fight against it!—instead of going on like all the rest of the world, not dreaming there is danger?”
Bill agreed with her.
“Think of it! We may even go to Mars, to fight ’em on their own ground!”
“Remember, Paula,” Trainor cautioned. “Don’t tell Mr. Windsor too much.”
“All right, Dad.”
Again the little clatter of the elevator. Mr. Cain had come into the observatory, a tall, slender young man, with a quizzical smile, and eyes dark and almost as enigmatic as Paula’s.
Bill, watching the vivacious girl, saw her smile at Cain. He saw her quick flush, her unconscious tremor. He guessed that she had some deep feeling for the man. But he seemed unaware of it. He merely nodded to the girl, glanced at Dr. Trainor, and spoke briskly to Bill. “Excuse me, Mr. Win—er, Bill, but I wish to see Dr.
Trainor alone. We will communicate with you when it seems necessary. In the meanwhile, I trust you to forget what you have seen here tonight, and what the Doctor has told you. Good evening.”
Bill, of necessity, stepped upon the elevator. Five minutes later he left Trainor’s Tower. Glancing up from the vividly bright, bustling street, with its moving ways and darting heliocars, he instinctively expected to see the starry heavens that had been in view from the observatory.
But a heavy cloud, like a canopy of yellow silk in the light that shone upon it from the city, hung a mile above. The upper thousands of feet of the slender tower were out of sight above the clouds.
After breakfast next morning Bill bought a shorthand news strip from a robot purveyor. In amazement and some consternation he read:
PRINCE OF SPACE RAIDS TRAINOR’S TOWER
Last night, hidden by the clouds that hung above the city, the daring interplanetary outlaw, the self-styled Prince of Space, suspected of the Helicon outrage, raided Trainor’s Tower. Dr. Trainor, his daughter Paula, and a certain Mr. Cain are thought to have been abducted, since they are reported to be missing this morning.
It is thought that the raiding ship drew herself against the Tower, and used her repulsion rays to cut through the walls. Openings sufficiently large to admit the body of a man were found this morning in the metal outer wall, it is said.
There can be no doubt that the raider was the “Prince of Space” since a card engraved with that title was left upon a table. This is the first time the pirate has been known to make a raid on the surface of the earth—or so near it as the top of Trainor’s Tower.
Considerable alarm is being felt as a result of this and the Helicon outrage of yesterday. Stimulated by the reward of ten million eagles, energetic efforts will be made on the part of the Moon Patrol to run down this notorious character.
CHAPTER II
Bloodhounds of Space
TWO days later Bill jumped from a landing heliocar, presented his credentials as special correspondent, and was admitted to the Lakehurst base of the Moon Patrol. Nine slender sunships lay at the side of the wide, high-fenced field, just in front of their sheds. In the brilliant morning sunlight they scintillated like nine huge octagonal ingots of polished silver.
These war-fliers of the Moon Patrol were eight-sided, about twenty feet in diameter and a hundred long. Built of steel and the new aluminum bronzes, with broad vision panels of heavy vitrolite, each carried sixteen huge positive ray tubes. These mammoth vacuum tubes, operated at enormous voltages from vitalium batteries, were little different in principle from the “canal ray” apparatus of some centuries before. Their “positive rays,” or streams of atoms which had lost one or more electrons, served to drive the sunship by reaction—by the well-known principle of the rocket motor.
And the sixteen tubes mounted in twin rings about each vessel served equally well as weapons. When focused on a point, the impact-pressure of their rays equaled that of the projectile from an ancient cannon. Metal in the positive ray is heated to fusion, living matter carbonized and burned away. And the positive charge carried by the ray is sufficient to electrocute any living being in contact with it.
This Moon Patrol fleet of nine sunships was setting out in pursuit of the Prince of Space, the interplanetary buccaneer who had abducted Paula Trainor and her father, and the enigmatic Mr. Cain. Bill was going aboard as special correspondent for the Herald-Sun.
On the night before the Helicon, the sunship which had been attacked in space, had been docked at Miami by the rescue crew put aboard from the Avenger. The world had been thrown into a frenzy by the report of the men who had examined the two hundred dead on board.
“Blood sucked from Helicon victims!” the loud speakers were croaking. “Mystery of lost sunship upsets world! Medical examination of the two hundred corpses found on the wrecked space flier show that the blood had been drawn from the bodies, apparently through curious circular wounds about the throat and trunk. Every victim bore scores of these inexplicable scars. Medical men will not attempt to explain how the wounds might have been made.
“In a more superstitious age, it might be feared that the Prince of Space is not man at all, but a weird vampire out of the void. And, in fact, it has been seriously suggested that, since the wounds observed could have been made by no animal known on earth, the fiend may be a different form of life, from another planet.”
Bill found Captain Brand, leader of the expedition, just going on board the slender, silver Fury, flagship of the fleet of nine war-fliers. He had sailed before with this bluff, hard-fighting guardsman of the space lanes; he was given a hearty welcome.
“Hunting down the Prince is a good-sized undertaking, from all appearances,” Bill observed.
“Rather,” big, red-faced Captain Brand agreed. “We have been after him seven or eight times in the past few years—but I think his ship has never been seen. He must have captured a dozen commercial sunships.”
“You know, I rather admire the Prince—” Bill said, “or did until that Helicon affair. But the way those passengers were treated is simply unspeakable. Blood sucked out!”
“It is hard to believe that the Prince is responsible for that. He has never needlessly murdered anyone before—for all the supplies and money and millions worth of vitalium he has taken. And he has always left his engraved card—except on the Helicon.
“But anyhow, we blow him to eternity on sight!”
The air-lock was open before them, and they walked through, and made their way along the ladder (now horizontal, since the ship lay on her side) to the bridge in the bow. Bill looked alertly around the odd little room, with its vitrolite dome and glistening instruments, while Captain Brand flashed signals to the rest of the fleet for sealing the locks and tuning the motor ray generators.
A red rocket flared from the Fury. White lances of flame darted from the down-turned vacuum tubes. As one, the nine ships lifted themselves from the level field. Deliberately they upturned from horizontal to vertical positions. Upward they flashed through the air, with slender white rays of light shooting back from the eight rear tubes of each.
Bill, standing beneath the crystal dome, felt the turning of the ship. He felt the pressure of his feet against the floor, caused by acceleration, and sat down in a convenient padded chair. He watched the earth become a great bowl, with sapphire sea on the one hand and green-brown land and diminishing, smokeless city on the other. He watched the hazy blue sky become deepest azure, then black, with a million still stars bursting out in pure colors of yellow and red and blue. He looked down again, and saw the earth become convex, an enormous bright globe, mistily visible through haze or air and cloud.
Swiftly the globe drew away. And a tiny ball of silver, half black, half rimmed with blinding flame, sharply marked with innumerable round craters, swam into view beyond the misty edge of the globe—it was the moon.
Beyond them flamed the sun—a ball of blinding light, winged with a crimson sheet of fire—hurling quivering lances of white heat through the vitrolite panels. Blinding it was to look upon it, unless one wore heavily tinted goggles.
Before them hung the abysmal blackness of space, with the canopy of cold hard stars blazing as tiny scintillant points of light, at an infinite distance away. The Galaxy was a broad belt of silvery radiance about them, set with ten thousand many-colored jewels of fire. Somewhere in the vastness of that void they sought a daring man, who laughed at society, and called himself the Prince of Space.
The nine ships spread out, a thousand miles apart. Flickering heliographs—swinging mirrors that reflected the light of the sun—kept them in communication with bluff Captain Brand, while many men at telescopes scanned the black, star-studded sweep of space for the pirate of the void.
Days went by, measured only by chronometer, for the winged, white sun burned ceaselessly. The earth had shrunk to a little ball of luminous green, bright on the sunward side, splotched with the dazzling white of cloud patches and polar caps.
Sometimes the black vitalium wings were spread, to catch the energy of the sun. The sunship draws its name from the fact that it is driven by solar power. It utilizes the remarkable properties of the rare radioactive metal, vitalium, which is believed to be the very basis of life, since it was first discovered to exist in minute traces in those complex substances so necessary to all life, the vitamins. Large deposits were discovered at Kepler and elsewhere on the moon during the twenty-first century. Under the sun’s rays vitalium undergoes a change to triatomic form, storing up the vast energy of sunlight. The vitalium plates from the sunshine are built into batteries with alternate sheets of copper, from which the solar energy may be drawn in the form of electric current. As the battery discharges, the vitalium reverts to its stabler allotropic form, and may be used again and again. The Vitalium Power Company’s plants in Arizona, Chili, Australia, the Sahara, and the Gobi now furnish most of the earth’s power. The sunship, recharging its vitalium batteries in space, can cruise indefinitely.
IT was on the fifth day out from Lakehurst. The Fury, with her sister ships spread out some thousands of miles to right and left, was cruising at five thousand miles per hour, at heliocentric elevation 93,243546, ecliptic declination 7°, 18′ 46″ north, right ascension XIX hours, 20 min., 31 sec. The earth was a little green globe beside her, and the moon a thin silver crescent beyond.
“Object ahead!” called a lookout in the domed pilothouse of the Fury, turning from his telescope to where Captain Brand and Bill stood smoking, comfortably held to the floor by the ship’s acceleration. “In Scorpio, about five degrees above Antares. Distance fifteen thousand miles. It seems to be round and blue.”
“The Prince, at last!” Brand chuckled, an eager grin on his square chinned face, light of battle flashing in his blue eyes.
He gave orders that set the heliographic mirrors flickering signals for all nine of the Moon Patrol fliers to converge about the strange object, in a great crescent. The black fins that carried the charging vitalium plates were drawn in, and the full power of the motor ray tubes thrown on, to drive ahead each slender silver flier at the limit of her acceleration.
