Collected Short Fiction, page 78
In college, Dick had majored in “art,” drawing frequent cartoons for the school paper. Now his aesthetic sense was delighted by the landscape below him. Its beauty was ideal; its perfection beyond that of nature. He wondered as he admired. Then the true meaning of it burst upon him. His whole prospect was a prodigious piece of landscape gardening! The whole world before him was a garden!
Beautiful towered buildings were set upon distant hills. All of them were separated by miles of the lovely, park-like woodland and meadow, yet scores of them were in his view. The population of this world, Dick thought, must be very great, if its whole surface were so scattered with such great buildings.
No two of the huge structures that crowned the hills were alike, either in plan or material. Some were tooled with gleaming domes, some were topped with slender spires and minarets, some were fantastically turreted. Cylindrical, some of them were, and others had square or many-sided walls. Glittering with silvery whiteness and golden yellow, glowing with lights of red rubies and cool green emeralds, gleaming with the blues of sapphire and jade and lapis lazuli, shining with the prismatic whiteness of marble and the brilliant black of jet, they shimmered like elfin palaces built of rarest gems.
Here and there about the brilliant landscape rose black, cylindrical towers, domes of dazzling white flame jetting from their tops to crown them in diamond splendor. They, as Dick soon learned—but when, he neglects to mention—were the climate-controlling machines, which tempered the air to its quality of never-ending springtime.
Eastward rose a serried wall of mountains, massive and majestic; veiled in blue haze of distance. Green clothed their lower slopes. Gleaming diadems of snow crowned the rows of higher peaks, dully crimsoned with the somber bloody gleams of sunset.
To the west, and far away, was an ocean, its surface hidden in soft gray haze save where the red light of the setting sun gleamed from a broad sheet of it, ruddy and bright, like a burnished copper shield.
The sun itself hung low in the west, in a sky that was clear and darkly blue, almost violet. It was smaller than Dick remembered it, and red. It was like a blood-red disk, slipping down the sky. He could watch it with his naked eye, unblinded.
The sun, cooled and shrunken, gave him his first real clue to the fact that he was miraculously in the world of the far future. Looking at it, he wondered at the delightful warmth of the air, which should, he thought, have been normally bitterfully cold. Not until later did he learn the function of the machines which warmed it.
As he was watching, Thon Ahrora touched his shoulder with a gentle hand, and pointed up at the summit of the highest peak in the east, beyond the second range. The pinnacle was crowned with a jeweled tiara of green metal, set with flashing purple gems. Or so it seemed to Dick, for he saw a glistening green dome, with lanced, scintillant purple rays leaping from it like arrows of amethystine flame into the deep violet sky.
Smith has told, too, of a sight-seeing trip he made to this place, with Thon Ahrora. Though he does not say, it must have been several months later, for they were able to converse with a fair degree of freedom.
The vehicle was shaped like an elongated egg of white, glistening metal. That is, it was stream-lined, round and blunt in front, tapering almost to a point behind. Many rectangular windows were set into it, allowing an almost unbroken view of surrounding objects. It was small, about four feet in diameter and seven long, with a single seat across it. The machinery—what Dick afterwards learned about it is covered by his notes—was entirely concealed. It was almost automatic. Thon Ahrora controlled the little craft by voicing occasional musical notes.
When they were seated side by side within it, the lovely girl spoke or sang a single, trilling note. The door closed, and the little craft, silently, and with no means of propulsion visible to Dick, rose swiftly into the air to a height of several hundred feet. Three more soft, liquid notes, and they darted off toward the strange coronet of green metal and purple fire upon the peak, at a speed that Dick estimated to be well over a thousand miles per hour.
“That is a space-port, where the ships come in from the stars,” the girl said. (Of course, all conversations recorded in Smith’s notes have been translated into our English—if they were not, no one would be able to read them.)
“Ships from the stars!” Dick ejaculated.
Thon Ahrora smiled at his astonishment. “Yes, men travel across interplanetary space as they crossed the seas in your time,” she said. “Even more easily, perhaps.”
Smith’s imagination was staggered. In all the wonders in which he had found himself, the possibility of interplanetary travel had not entered his head.
“You mean that ships go to the moon, and Mars and Venus!”
Thon Ahrora laughed. “No, the ships from the mountain go only to the planets of other suns. But this little flier would take us in a day to any planet in the solar system.” She looked at him with keen, twinkling eyes. “We can go to the moon now, if you wish. It would take but a few minutes.”
“No, thanks,” Dick said hastily. “I’d rather not. Some other day, perhaps.”
HE felt a strong need of a quiet hour or so to think over this astounding proposition of taking a ship for another solar system. It was bewildering, overwhelming.
“So other suns have planets with people on them?” he said at length.
“Yes,” said Thon Ahrora. “Most of the stars of the Galaxy have many planets. Tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, hardy pioneers from the earth colonized some of these planets. It was a hard struggle; there were differences in gravity to contend with, and in the composition of the seas and atmosphere. Some were too hot, some too cold. There was alien life to be conquered on many!
“But science has always won! Every planet is a garden, like the earth. If there was no air, men made it. If oceans were lacking, the mountains were melted into water with the El rays. If it was too cold, heating plants were built, like ours, liberating heat from atomic energy. If too hot, gases were generated in the air which reflected heat.”
“You mean there are people like us on the stars—people that talk as we do, think the same way!”
“There are. In your time was the beginning—the most interesting age of history, when science came to a race just emerging from barbarism, giving them more power than their gods. The English language was just becoming the universal tongue, to be fixed, by mechanical records, so that it remained the same through all the ages, the speech of all the races—not always changing, as purely spoken languages are.
“Now, with our radio and television, men can see each other over all the Galaxy—men can talk from sun to sun!”
“But how is it?” Dick broke in, recalling something he had learned back in Physics, 203. “There are stars that it takes light thousands of years to travel between.”
“I know that light is slow,” Thon Ahrora said. “Our speech, and our television pictures, and even our ships, are carried on the wings of the K-ray. Light is an electronic phenomenon. The K-ray is a vibration of a higher order, a phenomenon of the particles that make up electrons. It reaches instantaneously to the farthest star.
“But you have seen it!” she added suddenly. “Remember, on the day we brought you! You heard the voice of Garo Nark, from the Dark Star, across a void that light could not pass in a hundred thousand years!”
“I remember,” Dick replied, having often thought of the man on the purple throne, and the threat he had evidently made to Thon Ahrora. “But I had supposed him on this earth. Perhaps it is good that he is so far away. He seemed no friend of yours?”
“He is not!” the girl cried, clenching the little hands at her sides. “An enemy of mine, and my father’s! Mighty, he is. Lord of the Dark Star! Now, after he has scorned my father, and fought us for years, he wants me for one of his queens!”
Her lovely face, flushed with anger, was more beautiful than ever. Dick felt a sudden strong desire to kiss her; but forced himself to look straight ahead, at the rugged mountains rushing so rapidly to meet them, with hands on his knees.
“The Dark Star,” Thon Ahrora explained, “is a huge planet, which circles no sun, drifting alone through the night of space. Because it was so cold and desolate, with seas frozen solid, and atmosphere fallen in a crystal snow upon its barren mountain ranges, the colonists avoided it. It became the haunt of pirates of space, who carried their plunder and their captives there, to hidden retreats in its dead, frozen wildernesses.
“Among the pirates were scientists; and they captured others whom they forced to join them. Many times the fleets of the Union descended upon them, but always they brought forth new weapons, and held their own. For tens of thousands of years, the pirates have held the Dark Star, waging war on the Union of Man.
“Garo Nark, whom you saw, is Lord of the Dark Star, sole ruler of a mighty empire of pirates; he is the master of an outlaw planet. His fleets battle those of the Union on equal terms. Only the skill and genius of my father kept him from success in the conquest of the planets of another sun, in a great war of space waged twenty years ago—that is why he hates us.
“And on that day, when you saw him, he was demanding that I come to the Dark Star, to be one of the women whom he calls his queens!”
“Well, I’ll give him a run for his money!” Dick muttered in his old English.
Thon Ahrora, thoroughly angry and altogether adorable, suddenly roused herself, to intone a soft musical sound which brought their amazing vehicle to a halt, and let it drop a few thousand feet, to land near the huge crown of fire upon the mountain.
When the two of them stepped out upon the mountain-top, which was flat as if it had been truncated with a huge knife, Dick was astounded at the colossal size of the thing that had looked like a crown. It was a hemispherical dome of green metal, twenty-five hundred feet high, and well over half a mile across, at the base. Its surface seemed to be studded with black circles—which were round orifices, a hundred feet in diameter. Broad, brilliant purple rays spurted from them at intervals, stabbing into the sky.
They had alighted near the edge of the dome. The girl took him forward, through an arched door in the green metal wall. Never had Dick imagined such a scene as met his eyes. The lofty green hemisphere was luminous on the inner surface, shedding a soft green light, which illuminated the amazing machines and the scene of furious, bustling activity within.
From each of the black openings that studded the dome sprang inward a huge, straight, transparent tube—a great pipe of glass-like substance, a hundred feet in diameter, and a thousand in length. The inner ends of these colossal, cannon-like tubes of crystal were fastened in a huge frame of silvery metal that rose five hundred feet in the center of the dome, a frame filled with machinery complicated beyond Dick’s ability to describe it. He only gives the impression that the apparatus connected with each tube resembled that about the carriage of a modern naval gun—providing means, doubtless, for training the tube, and for absorbing any recoil. Immediately behind each tube was a sort of reflector, polished and silvery, carrying inside it something resembling an enormous, S-shaped neon tube, which burned with a bright purple glow while the tube was in use.
Outside this great mechanism in which the bases of the crystal tubes rested, an upright silvery cylinder rose from the floor to the side of each of them. These cylinders, Thon Ahrora informed him, were elevator shafts up which freight and passengers were brought from subway terminals cut in the living rock of the mountain below.
“Watch!” the girl cried suddenly, pointing to a great, transparent tube above them, in which a purple glow had suddenly sprung up. “See, the K-ray is in the tube! A ship is flashing down the beam, to earth from another planet of a far-off star!”
Suddenly, the red-violet light went out. And nearly two-thirds of the length of the tube was taken up with a great cylindrical ship of gleaming white metal, a hundred feet in diameter and six hundred in length.
A gangplank was thrown across, from an opening in the end of the vast ship, through a sliding door in the transparent tube, to the upright cylinder of the elevator shaft. Dick saw a broad stream of passengers surging across it, many of them carrying packages of various kinds. Thousands of them poured out, vanishing into the elevator shaft, which, he thought, must have a sort of endless chain arrangement, in order to be able to accommodate so many. Then came a river of trucks, bearing boxes and bales and barrels—rich merchandise of foreign worlds, treasures of far-off planets, brought in the holds of this great argosy of space.
Half an hour he watched, thrilled, amazed, and wondering, before the stream of men and goods dwindled and stopped. Immediately a counter-current set up in the opposite direction. A second crowd of passengers rushed into the ship. The endless rivers of trucks brought back innumerable loads of cargo.
Then the gangplank was drawn back, the opening closed in the silver side of the ship, the sliding door in the crystal tube fastened. A purple glow lit the S-shaped tube behind the great ship, flowed up about it, filling the crystal cylinder. And abruptly the ship was gone, off to another planet.
Smith had much to fill his thoughts as the little vehicle shot back with them to the huge building of silver towers, upon the green, forested hill.
He has given us an account, also, of a conversation with Midos Ken, the blind father of Thon Ahrora, about the means by which he was brought to this astounding world of futurity.
“Your coming to Bardon,” the old man said, “was an accident. Or at least it is an accident that you were selected instead of some rock or other dead object. But now that you are here, you need not fear for your welcome.” A warm, kindly smile lit the lined face of the old man.
“I am a scientist, you know,” he went on. “The years of my life, even my eyes, I have given to find knowledge—knowledge that will aid mankind to live happily. Of late years, my daughter has been my eyes and my hands; and we have labored together.
“One great quest has been ours—a search for the one great secret that still evades us. The one secret that will banish the fear that weighs like a load on every man, that will fill the long days of humanity with complete happiness.
“Our experiment has always failed. One substance there is, which we must have, and which we cannot make in our laboratories—Thon is planning to try again; but I have no hope of her success. Failing to synthesize it, I thought to reach forward or backward into Time, to find it already in existence—for Nature, which is infinite, must sometime have formed it.
“For Time is merely another magnitude, a dimension at right angles to the three we move in. The theory was good. The experiment worked to the extent that it brought you to us—you were snatched up and drawn through time by a field of force generated by the domes of flame at the ends of the black table.
“But even that experiment failed of its object, for it takes a tremendous amount of force to change any object in the past. Even I can hardly understand this unexpected inertia—but it must be due to the fact that the events of one day influence those of the next, and thus, to move an object in the past, I had to change a chain of consequences reaching through the whole expanse of time.
“To bring you here, out of the past, consumed energy enough to stop the earth in its orbit, and send it crashing into the sun!
“Exploration of the future failed even more completely, as certain metaphysical considerations will show that it must, because of the way the future is dependent upon the present.
“Thus, we are able to search only in the present time for the substance we need. It does not exist on any planet that has been explored. I have sent scouts to prospect for it on those few and distant planets where man has never gone. And Thon Ahrora is going to try once more, at our great laboratory back in the mountains, to synthesize it from pure energy!”
“So I am in the future, after all!” Dick said.
“From your old point of view,” Midos Ken agreed with a smile. “You might consider it the present, now, however. It would be quite beyond the power of our apparatus to send you back, though we might send a message, or something of the kind.”
“Who wants to go back, anyhow?” Dick grinned. “But how far in the past did I come from?”
“I can’t tell you exactly,” the old man said, “since the historians are a little uncertain in their chronology. But it is a bit more than two million, twenty-five thousand and eighty years!”
Dick whistled, and stood a while in dazed silence. But he recovered quickly, being by this time used to such staggering facts, and asked another question.
“Tell me, what is this great experiment?”
Midos Ken smiled, rather sadly and wistfully, Dick “thought.
“Wait, son, and you shall see,” he whispered.
CHAPTER III
The Day of Failure
ON his second day in this new world, Dick had cast aside his old clothing, which would have been uncomfortably warm in the eternal summer that prevailed. Thon Ahrora had provided him with the short, sleeveless garments that seemed the universal garb. He had been welcomed into the simple household of Midos Ken—which consisted only of the blind scientist and his daughter. They occupied only a part of one of the towers of the huge building, which housed a small city. Its name was Bardon.
Smith was intensely interested in the social system and the government of the world about him. Much space in his notes is devoted to such topics, though we can only glance at them here.
Food, in a variety of delicious forms that was bewildering to him at first, was manufactured in great laboratories, synthetically, and distributed freely to the entire population, whether they labored or not.
