Collected Short Fiction, page 83
Then, with a smile of triumph, Thon flung down a lever. The light of the blue crystal disk flickered out. The space flier lay complete on the vast black table. A long red cylinder, graceful, tapering, bright and glistening like Chinese ruby glaze. Its forward end, blunt and rounded, was studded with small windows, round and black. A massive round door swung open in her side. The rear end tapered gracefully, almost to a point.
The metal bridge fell to span the water that rushed angrily between the platform and the stage where they stood, water that was still rising rapidly. Thon seized her father’s hand, led the way swiftly across it.
The great building seems to have fallen just as they reached the door of the red ship. The water was just lapping over the edge of the black platform. Then, suddenly, the platform was reeling, and the metal roof was crashing down upon them.
Dick seized Thon and Midos Ken in his arms, and made a plunge through the round door—using tactics borrowed from his football experience. He got them safely inside, and the girl touched a lever that closed and locked the massive door.
Then, it seems, they were tumbled about somewhat. But the interior of the Ahrora was thickly padded; and her neutronium armor was indestructible.
The building must have gone down before the combined force of the mad torrent and a rolling boulder. The Ahrora fell, probably, from the black platform to the floor. Possibly the boulder struck her—meeting one object that it could not grind beneath it. The flier may even have been carried for some distance by the raging flood.
Then, almost before Dick realized what was happening, everything was oddly still. The ship had evidently come to rest. He found himself braced against a padded wall, with a supporting arm about the shoulders of old Midos Ken. Thon had vanished.
They were in a low corridor. One side of it had the curve of the ship’s hull, the other was straight, broken with doors at close intervals. Just behind them in the curved wall was the massive mechanism of the flier’s door. The narrow way seemed to run along one side of the vessel, from end to end, giving entrance to the various compartments. Soft, green, shadowless light fell upon them from a luminous substance on the softly padded walls.
“Come here, Dick, and look!” a soft call in Thon’s voice came down the corridor. He hurried down it, his shoulders almost brushing the wall on each side.
His sense of which direction was down changed oddly as he reached the end of the passage. For most of its length he walked along normally. But as he neared the end, it seemed that he was climbing. He had to climb through a sort of hatchway at its end.
He emerged inside a small, dome-shaped room—it was, he knew, the nose of the flier. The curving wall above his head was also padded, though its surface was smooth and glowing with soft greenish radiance. It was broken with the numerous little portholes, closed with shutters of white metal.
A narrow bench encircled the room. Upon it, and the curved wall above it, was a bewildering complexity of dials with trembling needles, of flashing bulbs and glowing tubes, of wheels and levers and spinning disks, of coils and purring apparatus that he could not describe.
In the center of the room was a small stand, and above it a white metal tube leading to the middle of the dome above—suggesting, to Dick, a periscope. Below the end of the tube, centering the top of the stand, was a gray screen. About it was a circle of variously colored keys.
At one side of the stand was a little upright lever of polished metal, with a white button on its top. Thon stood with her fingers lightly upon it.
“What happened?” Dick burst out. “Are we lodged on the bottom of the river?”
The girl laughed. She flashed him a tantalizing smile.
“Open a window and see,” she said, pointing to one of the closed portholes.
DICK flung open the shutter. He was dazed, staggered, by the sight that burst upon him through the crystal disk.
He looked into interplanetary space!
The sky was black, utterly, inconceivably. Blacker than anything he had ever seen or imagined. And studded with a million diamonds. Hard, bright points of fire burned cold and motionless in it. White and red, orange and blue and green, dazzling pin points of light. And scattered among them, against the absolute blackness, were silvery sheets and clouds and spirals of faint nebular radiance.
He saw the heavens as he had never seen them in his own age. He saw them as they appear to one beyond the veil of air and cloud and dust that always hides most of their splendor from us.
Swimming in this void of diamonded midnight he saw a huge, luminous-globe. A greenish sphere, larger than the moon, its surface liquidly indistinct. It was irregularly splotched with clouds of dazzling white, with vague brown and blue areas. Here and there was a brown-green outline that looked vaguely familiar.
“What is that, Thon?” he asked, pointing. “Where are we, anyhow? And how did we get here?”
Thon laughed again, delightfully.
“That is a planet called the earth,” she told him. “It is the original home of a race of small beings who call themselves men. Haven’t you heard of it?”
“Be serious!” he pleaded. “Is that really the earth?”
“Oh, I know it looks small and insignificant!” she said airily, with a gleam of mischief in her blue eyes. “But it’s still rather out of its true proportion.”
She pressed a finger upon the little white button.
Dick felt no sensation of motion. (The K-ray, as Midos Ken had explained, applied its power equally to every particle of matter on the ship, so there was no effect of acceleration.)
But the earth dwindled suddenly. A tiny white crescent—the moon—came into Dick’s field of view beside it. They shrank to a single dimepoint of light—vanished! A very bright star, blue-white, dazzling, crept into the window. At first Dick did not recognize it.
“The sun!” he muttered after a puzzled moment.
And the sun dimmed, until after a short time it was little brighter than blue-white Vega.
“A few more at this rate, and the sun itself would vanish!” Thon informed him.
“But how did we get out of the flood?” he persisted.
“I managed to get to the controls,” Thon told him. “Then it was easy. We just drove up through the wreckage. Our K-rays generate enough power to drive the ship through solid rock!”
She beckoned him to stand beside her. “Come,” she said. “Let me show you how to drive the flier.” Her fingers rested lightly in the little silvery bar with the white button at its top. “You press this white button to increase the speed,” she told him. “Relax the pressure, and we continue to move forward through space, carried by our momentum, for there is almost no friction. But the button must be held down just slightly for that—when the pressure is altogether relaxed, the K-rays are thrown forward, to brake our flight and bring us to a stop.
“And to turn in any direction, merely incline the lever in that direction. Now try it!”
Dick was almost reluctant to try, for fear he would send them crashing into some sun or planet. Thon insisted, assuring him that space is very empty, and that he couldn’t guide the ship into a planet if he tried.
He accepted the controls. His first inclination of the little lever was violent, and sent the Ahrora into a mad spin, from which Thon had to extract her. But after a few minutes he understood the mechanism, and got a huge amount of delight from the swift movement which he controlled so easily.
The complex apparatus about the walls, Thon informed him, had to do with the generation of the K-rays, with the automatic recording and plotting of the flier’s course on long voyages, with purifying and drying the air and keeping it at the proper temperature and with the necessary proportion of oxygen. There was a flat floor or deck, and a flat ceiling in the part of the flier behind the domed bridge. The space between these and the curved walls was used for storing a reserve of atomic fuel for the generators and oxygen for the passengers.
The space between the bridge in the nose of the flier, and the generator room in her stern, was divided into five tiny compartments—the miniature galley, in which their meals were to be prepared and eaten, three tiny staterooms, for Thon, Midos Ken, and Dick, and a storeroom aft, in which reposed the weapons Thon had condensed for Midos Ken, and various other equipment that promised to be useful to interplanetary adventures, such as air-pressure suits for venturing outside the ship in space, tools, chemicals, and emergency rations.
Presently Thon conducted Dick down the narrow corridor to his stateroom. A tiny space it was, just over six feet long, and about that wide. A comfortable berth was built out against the curved wall formed by the hull. The padded, smooth wall, glowing greenly, supplied illumination. There was mirror, toilet utensils, lavatory with hot and cold running water, a closet filled with fresh linen and clean garments.
It filled Dick with fresh amazement to think that the little room had never been entered before, that Thon, with her wonderful science, had formed every article in it by merely tapping on a bank of keys.
“What do you think of it?” she asked him as she showed him the various conveniences, all arranged even more cleverly and compactly than those of our own modern apartments. Pride was shining in her eyes.
“It’s all wonderful!” Dick cried, repressing a strong desire to throw his arms around her and kiss her as she had once done to him—which is probably what she expected him to do.
Presently she opened a little panel near the head of his bunk and showed him the weapon she had condensed for him. It was shaped like an automatic he had drawn for her. But it was covered with the same glistening red neutronic armor as the ship. The extra magazines were little cylinders which fitted up into the butt.
He tried the balance of it, sighted down it, and laid it back in its compartment, smiling with satisfaction. It felt like a real weapon. And from what Midos Ken had said about it, it was!
As they left the room, another thought crossed his mind. “How is it that we can walk here, away from the gravity of the earth?” he asked. “And why is it that here and in the corridor down is toward the side of the ship, while up in the bridge is toward the rear end of the ship?”
“Gravity plates in the floor,” Thon said. “Gravity is just one of the vibrations on the order of the K-ray. We control it. Men used to fight with rays which cut off gravity and sent objects flying off into space. Such rays are used yet, on certain heavy, dense planets, to lessen the force of gravity in buildings, to make the human inhabitants comfortable.”
As she spoke, they had filed up the corridor, and climbed into the dome again, where Midos Ken was waiting.
“Where are we going now?” Dick demanded. “Are we off to the Dark Star?”
“Not in this flier,” Thon told him. “She is too slow. Such a long flight would take a year!”
“Slow!” Dick ejaculated. “And here we have already gone so far the sun looks like a star!”
“You don’t realize cosmic distances yet,” Midos Ken put in. “We are hardly half a light year from the sun. And it is at least one hundred thousand light years to the Dark Star.”
“Then how are we going? What’s the good in having the Ahrora unless we use her?”
“We shall ship the flier on a K-ray liner to the sun nearest the Dark Star,” Thon said. “That way, we can cover the hundred thousand light years in a day. And it will only take a week or so to reach the Dark Star.”
“I see,” Dick agreed. “But I wouldn’t have accused the Ahrora of being slow!”
“And now we go back to Bardon,” Midos Ken said, “to get a few instruments I must have. And you might load a few coffers of your diamond tokens in the storeroom, Dick. In two hours, we fly from the space-port on the mountain!”
With a skill that hinted of much practise, Thon drove the flier back until the sun was no longer merely a bright star. With almost the speed of light she circled about the earth, entered the atmosphere, and flashed down beside the great building of silver towers.
The angry black pall of the storm still hung over the mountain valley in the east, but here the warm, fragrant air was undisturbed. And the huge green dome upon the farther range of peaks, with the purple paths of the K-ray jetting from it, was still in view, like a wondrous crown of emerald and amethyst.
Midos Ken shut off the apparatus he had set to trap any invisible man who might attempt to molest their belongings in their absence. Quickly the scientific equipment of the old man, and Dick’s remaining coffers of tokens, were loaded on the Ahrora.
AND here, the action of our story leaves the earth.
l. What follows is a narrative of adventure in space, and on other worlds. The history of the great quest for the secret of life! There will be room for little more comment on the daily life and customs, the laws and the social institutions of futurity.
I have tried to give the reader some idea of that future age, and of the lives of its people. Most of the three hundred thousand words of Dick’s notes is relative to such topics. But I feel that I have failed. The adventure part of the story has run away with me, in a manner of speaking. And I shall leave it as it is. Such other topics as the political and economic structure of the future state are tremendously interesting, of course. But they must be left to the coming book, “A Vision of Futurity.”
There are a thousand things I have no space to mention here. The system of education, for example. Thon once explained it to Dick, took him to visit schools and nurseries. Most children were received by them at the age of a few months, though parents who were competent to do so could secure permission to raise their children in their own homes. It seems that those children of the future were reared more happily than those of our own day, and with greater psychological understanding. Their lives were free and natural—they were not imprisoned by repressions and inhibitions, by unjust laws and outworn conventions, false ideals and intolerant religions, as are children of our own time. This universal education was the foundation of that wonderful social system of the future. Without ideals and capacities rightly developed, liberty would have meant anarchy.
But I must leave such subjects.
THE three boarded the Ahrora again. Thon piloted her swiftly to the leveled mountain top, of the colossal green dome from which dazzling purple rays spurted into the sky. The little flier was landed on the floor within the lofty, incredible building, beneath the prodigious crystal tubes from which the K-ray liners were shot on the purple beams to the planets of other suns.
Thon and Dick left the Ahrora, carrying a coffer of the diamond tokens. They descended an elevator to a series of vast chambers cut in the living rock of the mountain, compared to which the Grand Central Station of our knowledge seemed like a country railroad depot.
There, in a confused rush of millions of hurrying travelers, they found a ticket office, and arranged to ship the Ahrora on the next liner toward a certain sun, and to take passage themselves. Dick was rather dazed—he remembers little of the procedure, except that most of the contents of the coffer had to be counted out, to pay their fare and the freight on the flier.
“The Dark Star is in the same general direction as the Green Star,” Thon told Dick as the elevator was carrying them back up, with the lightened coffer. “That is, they both lie in that section of the heavens designated as Perseus. The Green Star, as poor Don Galeen named it, is much farther away, of course, being outside the Galaxy. Our K-ray liner goes to Anral, which is a sun only six light years from the Dark Star.”
They had reached the door of the flier. In a few minutes an official in blue uniform approached them. He came aboard and into the bridge room. Following his directions, Thon maneuvered the flier up beside one of the enormous, transparent tubes. There lines were fastened to it, and it was drawn through the sliding door in the side of the tube, and into the hold of the immense vessel of silvery metal that filled most of the tube’s interior.
There they left it, fastened down with the lines, with bales and boxes of cargo piled about it. They reached the passengers’ apartments above, in the central part of the great vessel, through a curious elevator in which gravity was shut off, allowing them to be lifted by a swiftly moving current of air.
Dick had paid for a rather luxurious suite—a drawing room, with Thon’s stateroom, and a larger one occupied by both Dick and Midos Ken, opening from it. Meals were taken in the vast, magnificent dining room, with the rest of the passengers.
As on the Ahrora, there was no sense of motion or acceleration. Most of the passengers did not know just when the ship left the tube. Thon and Dick, however, were standing at one of the portholes through which they could look out. All at once the colossal green dome vanished above them, and they were plunging through space at such a rate that the stars looked like streaks of light, instead of points. There were other interesting optical phenomena, such as changes in color and displacement of the stars, due to the fact that their velocity was many times that of light. Dick enters into a discussion of them in his notes, but he uses unfamiliar scientific terms of futurity, which he does not explain. I do not follow him completely. His notes will be quoted in full in “A Vision of Futurity,” of course; but I shall not attempt to deal with the matter here.
The first day of the voyage Dick enjoyed immensely. He dined with Thon and her father in the splendid saloon. He danced with the lovely girl, to the fine music provided by the ship’s orchestra. They played at some game resembling tennis. Thon, like most of the people of that future day, was a superb athlete. They bathed in the great pool of the ship—Dick was by this time well enough accustomed to the changed conventions of futurity so that he was only momentarily disconcerted at the idea of public bathing without a costume.
Midos Ken remained in his stateroom most of the time, sunk in deep thought. Such thought was necessary, Dick agreed, if they were to succeed in the attempt to rescue Don Galeen from the power of the Lord of the Dark Star. But, as he said, he didn’t know enough about the Dark Star to even think about it.
