Fire in the Heavens (1958)

by George O. Smith

  Woods scratched his head. “Is that a real solar-powered jet?”

  “I wouldn’t know from here.”

  “But if it were, could it have caused the nova—or any part of it?”

  Jeff considered a moment, then shook his head. “I doubt it. It’s so confoundedly small compared to the sun. But-well, I wouldn’t know.”

  Jerry Woods smiled confidently. “I’ve got to be going,” he said. ‘I’ll call you as soon as we learn whether Lucille got away from that mob. We’ll know before anybody else. And as for the jet, let me know as soon as you learn something?”

  “What makes you think I’ll learn anything from these drawings?”

  Jerry Woods looked at Jeff and smiled. “You will,” he said. “You will.”

  Jerry Woods was wrong on one count. It was Charles Horne and not he who brought confirmation and details of Lucille Roman’s escape to Jeff Benson. Horne came late that night and handed Jeff Benson a newspaper which screamed in black headlines:

  HUNT LUCILLE ROMAN

  AS FUGITIVE!

  BLAMED FOR SOLAR MENACE

  The piece went on that her act of using the Roman Jet had been responsible for the solar nova, according to some scientists and other prominent men. Such an act, declared the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the International Security Commission, was against the public weal, and demanded that she surrender herself. A ten-thousand-dollar reward was offered for her apprehension.

  “So she got away,” said Jeff.

  “Yes, dammit. Say, how did you know?”

  “Jerry Woods told me about the first account and I knew that a mob would form and so—”

  “Good thinking,” interrupted Horne, not waiting to hear the details of the fight as Jeff had heard it through the telephone. “Too bad they didn’t take her apart.”

  “I hardly agree with that.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’d hate to think of even Lucille Roman getting the treatment that wild mob was handing out.”

  “She deserved it. Every bit.”

  “No one deserves that.”

  “She did.”

  “Now look,” said Jeff angrily, “no man deserves mob rule. No human being, however bad.”

  Horne shook his head. “Some people get away with so much murder for such a long time that the only way to bring them to justice is to hand ‘em over to the mob—and let nature take its course, with a hang-noose, or anything else.” “That’s not the way I see it. If constituted, competent authorities find nothing in the actions of a person to brand him as a criminal, then how can you argue that a mob, with little or no judgment or real knowledge of the details, act as judge, jury and executioner—just because they think he’s a criminal? Or want to think so?”

  Horne tapped his forefinger on the newspaper spread before them. “According to your authorities, she’s a criminal, all right. She’s a fugitive from the law, and that fact alone makes her a criminal. Anyhow, Lucille Roman started that nova which will fry us all. But I want to live long enough to watch her fry first.”

  “That’s a pretty savage viewpoint, it seems to me,” Jeff smiled.

  “In the first place, a long time ago there was a rigid document written that positively declared against any kind of retroactive punishment,” said Jeff pointedly. “If a man builds an obelisk on Tuesday when such is legal and then laws are passed against obelisks on Friday, no one can condemn him and toss him into the bastille.”

  “Even so, she started this and she should be punished.” Jeff shook his head. ‘Tm not too certain yet,” he said. “But I have some plans and some notes and a few high-flung ideas about the Roman Jet. Horne, I’m almost convinced that the Roman Jet was an effect of the the nova, rather than the cause.”

  “You’re working on it?”

  “Remember, Horne—some time ago I stated that we could learn a lot about gravity if we could modulate it. Well, Doctor Phelps was trying to develop a neutrino detector, I’m told, which led to the discovery of the Roman Jet.

  “I’m not entirely willing to accept the neutrino, as necessary, but what Phelps was looking for was the source of what-ever-it-is that causes the flaw, in the conservation of energy.”

  “So?”

  “So, because Sol was already unstable, Phelps located a hitherto undiscovered effect. This he refined and improved until he developed the Roman Jet. He might never have discovered it had it not been for Sol’s instability.”

  “You’re sure reaching for it, there, Jeff. A lot of wild premises.”

  Jeff nodded. “Maybe. But I stand on solider ground than Phelps. I have some plans, and perhaps a better idea of what goes into this thing than he did at any stage of the game. And within a week I’ll be working on Phelp’s jet effect.” “What do you hope to do but make it quicker?”

  “Shucks, Horne, I’m convinced that the Roman Jet is the effect and the nova the cause. You can’t tell me that a little jet like that could cause any perceptible stellar disturbance!”

  Horne shrugged. He pointed to the large star-map on the wall of the laboratory and said dramatically, “Perhaps the novas we see out in the sky from year to year are caused by strong-minded scientists who plunged ahead and developed their own versions of the Roman Jet.”

  “Maybe, Horne. But I’ll know in not too long a time. Tm not too certain right now that the Roman Jet does have anything to do with Sol. If Tm postulating like mad, certainly you are doing the same.”

  “Well, anyway, Roman needed to be clipped.”

  “Frankly, Tm sorry for Lucille Roman. At least I have my work, though it may never be finished. I can keep busy and do less thinking.”

  “I can’t. There isn’t enough activity in the market nowadays to buy the matches to bum my dime-a-dozen stocks. Oh, well, why talk about it?”

  Jeff grinned. He turned to his bench and picked up a length of dural tubing. “Hold this for me, will you?”

  “Sure thing,” said Horne.

  It was almost dawn by the time Horne left and Jeff Benson was well on the way towards building his first copy of the Roman Jet.

  CHAPTER XII

  As Charles Horne left, he was thinking furiously. With billions of other earthbound people Horne did not want to die in even the most spectacular of cosmic combustions. To die with pomp and ceremony and share a monument that would attract the attention of every sentient being in the galaxy and other galaxies for thousands of millions of years was small compensation for the fact that he could not die very quietly, and as comfortably as possible, of very old age.

  Life was the survival of the fittest and man was certainly fit. Weakling that he was, man was master of his earthly environment because he had a brain. From the forests and the swamps he rose, gaining mastery over the material things in his environment where other animals—most of them stronger or more prolific than he—could not.v

  Man faced fire and stood his ground where other animals fled in terror or died because they did not recognize the grim destroyer. And eventually man took fire into his cave and made it work for him.

  Something could be done—something must be done. This much Horne knew, for with human egocentricity he believed himself to be the highest form of his species, destined some day to rule not only terra but the planets of Sol and eventually the universe.

  Man, physical weaking, was master of all. Strip him of clothing, shelter, tools and means of communication. Drop him a strange jungle, teeming with feral beasts and poisonous snakes with plants and berries that cause cramp or death, and does he, like a lower animal, perish?

  Perhaps. For there is that chance. But let him live an hour and he is armed with a club. Let him live a day and his club has a sharpened stone laced to its end, he has snares set to trap food; and he has shelter.

  Give him a week and he has the hide of one of the predators to clothe his naked hairless body and the flesh of the deadly animal to eat. And at the end of that week the animals of the jungle give him a wide berth, for man is a dangerous character
.

  Man became master of his earthly environment only because that environment threatened his life at every turn along the’ trail leading up from the slime and primordial ooze to the tall shining cities.

  Now that man could change the face of the earth at his will, this new threat came from outside. Man must meet that threat somehow, and overcome it.

  Horne looked at the dawning day and shook his head.

  One of the tenets of man’s ability to control was his sensible readiness to flee when real danger threatened. It is not always necessary to stand and fight—it is even less than wise to stand and fight a losing battle. Sol was a threat that meant definitely a losing battle.

  Therefore the thing to do was—by some means—to flee. To leave Sol before the nova, and let the sun cast its awesome flare of bursting energy against a family of unpeopled planets. Second to that was the escape of enough people to make a new start on some planet that might offer a chance for survival.

  Enough people? That meant two at least.

  Perhaps, if the nova had happened at an earlier day, the hope of escape would not have flared in every breast. But people knew of the Roman Spacecraft, and there was a faint flame of optimism in every mind, whether its owner had any chance of using the remarkable spaceship or not. Horne’s conclusion was not unique. It echoed. and re-echoed in the hearts of billions of people.

  Only those thoroughly aware of the terrific extent of interstellar reaches were without hope.

  Yet Horne was not ignorant of the facts. He knew that the rocket seemed to have unlimited power. He had watched, tense and rapt, as it took off on its maiden flight and, instead of hesitating and staggering, poised in that fearful moment when success or failure hung in the delicate balance of a fuel supply or a tank of oxygen—like the earlier White Sands experiment—he saw the Roman Jet lift the craft aloft with the effortless power of a diesel-electric locomotive drawing a single passenger car.

  It had gone up swiftly and, as far as the eye could reach through deep-colored glasses, the jets had traced their glowing path in sharp relief even against a cloudless afternoon sky.

  Sol, through the same glasses, was a dull red-purple disc. The jets had been blinding. Then, as they became less searing to the eye, Horne had taken the glasses off—swiftly, lest he lose the soaring trails.

  He had cursed when they stuck to his ears because that took time and the rocket was rising swiftly. He had pot his head down to disentangle the bows from behind his ears and he felt the rocket would be gone when he again looked up.

  But in the sky, so high that the eight searing jets seemed to be converged into one tiny blinding spot, flew the rocket, its velocity still increasing in prodigious ratio.

  Horne believed that the Roman Jet tapped Sol’s internal nuclear power. If he Were right, then that same power could be used in simple acceleration, hour after hour after hour, until the velocity of the spacecraft reached an appreciable portion of the velocity of light. And Alpha was only about four light-years away. Eight years of soaring through interstellar space would not kill any man if he were determined to live I

  All Horne needed now was to get his hands on Lucille Roman’s spacecraft and then engage Jeff Benson to show him how it could be operated.

  Supplies? Horne had that problem figured out. The big problem was getting the spacecraft from a woman who hated his insides.

  But Lucille Roman was keeping very well hidden. Wanted for tampering with the sun, clamored for by outraged people as a murderess for causing the deaths of the men in the mob which had ruined her laboratory and executed her chief scientist, Lucille Roman was not likely to appear in any place where she could be recognized.

  Certainly she was not likely to be at any of her other plants, nor at her country homes, for as the mob had killed Doctor Phelps and mined the Roman Laboratory, other mobs had broken into her other plants and laid waste to them. Her apartment was a chaotic mess and her country homes had all been burned to the ground while angry crowds stood by to keep the flames from setting fire to the forests around them.

  But if Jeff Benson said he had good reason to think the Roman Jet was not responsible for the nova, Jeff Benson was probably right. Jeff was one of those rare people who are often maddening because his “It might possibly be,” meant it had at least a fifty-fifty chance, and to Jeff, with scientific caution, “fifty-fifty” meant almost a dead certainty.

  So the thing to do was to watch Jeff and wait until the scientist proved his point. Then to nudge the authorities into visiting Jeff, who would make them listen before they took him away for seeming to tinker with the sun.

  Jeff could prove his point, once he himself was convinced. That would free Lucille Roman of the initial charge and she could return to civilization.

  Horne shrugged. He could get the spacecraft if it were impounded in Fort Knox. If it were left or kept in any place of less security, it would be that much easier.

  So Horne was a frequent visitor to Jeff’s laboratory during the next few weeks. He saw the development of the first jet grow from a tiny thing made of odd parts and baling wire to a mighty instrument which occupied Jeff Benson’s attention so deeply that he often forgot Horne was present.

  Daily letters went back and forth between Jeff and Professor Lasson and between them they accomplished much. Lasson kept his eye on Sol and on the galaxy while Jeff worked out an angle here and unraveled a knot there and forthwith either wrote to Lasson or called on the telephone to tell him what to seek for next. Then one day Jeff Benson went around nodding to himself. This happened to be one of the days upon which Horne had come to call and watch.

  That night Horne wrote a careful letter to Washington and Jeff had more visitors a few days later.

  They came in, five of them, with sour looks on grim faces. There were a uniformed police official, two younger men with the cold, clear, intelligent look of the government operative and two elderly gentlemen who, for all their obvious age, had bright eyes and very firm tread.

  “Mister Benson?”

  “Yes”

  “‘Captain Hansen of the Chicago Police. I am Fred Cole and this is Louis Freeland of the F.B.I. This is Doctor Logan of the Federal Technical Department, and the Undersecretary of State, Mr. Scarland.”

  “Tin honored.”

  “You’re close to arrest, Mister Benson.”

  “I am?”

  “We’re told you are experimenting with solar power.” “But I-”

  Doctor Logan peered over Jeff’s shoulder and nodded. “You are.”

  “I am,” admitted Jeff. “Please come in.”

  They came in. They would have come in anyway, of course, without Jeff’s invitation, Fred Cole said, “You are aware that this is against the law?”

  “I am. But it may be the means to our salvation.”

  “It was the means of our downfall.”

  “That is not true.”

  “Have you proof?”

  Jeff smiled sourly. “Have you any proof that it is or was?”

  “The statement of a few physicists.”

  “A statement is no proof. May I show you something?” Jeff showed them the small jet, covered by a tall cylinder of black glass. Inside the cylinder, the jet was searing upward in a minute lancet of energy.

  “I have proof,” said Jeff. “Now, gentlemen—”

  “I warn you,” said Captain Hansen, “that anything you say will be used against you.”

  Jeff fixed Hansen with a cold stare. “Tm a bit appalled,” he said sarcastically. “I’m completely baffled by an attitude that insists that no research be done.”

  “We have reason to believe that this thing may hasten the blowup.”

  “Well, in answer to Hansen’s statement, it is of little importance to me. Since I’ve been caught with the solar jet in my possession and have admitted it, nothing that I say can have any further bearing on the charge. Furthermore, if I’m taken to jail or even executed, what have I lost but a little time of life?

&n
bsp; “It strikes me that a people threatened with extinction should foster any sort of research rather than idly stand by for their short remaining period of life. This is the time to take chances, gentlemen. That is why I took this one. Now, may I continue?”

  Doctor Logan cleared his throat. “Mister Benson, the only reason you are not being taken to jail right now is because many men hold you in high regard. Yet you have broken a law—”

  “Law!” jeered Benson. “What good are laws when the sun is blowing up?”

  Scarland nodded quietly. “Let him continue.”

  Jeff nodded his thanks to the Undersecretary of State.

  “Now,” he said, “this jet you see comes from the most minute of orifices. Yet it is three feet long and a full eighth of an inch in diameter at its widest point. The spacial orifice from which it comes is less than three one-thousandths of an inch in diameter. This is the prototype of Doctor Phelps’ model.

  “With a job similar to this Phelps developed the jet that drives the Roman Spacecraft. However, Miss Roman is the type of person who sees in science only the chance to advance herself. She could not be bothered to investigate anything but that which showed commercial promise. Therefore Doctor Phelps was murdered, screaming that his jet did not tap the sun.”

  “Does it?”

  Jeff nodded. “The jet consists of high-energy protons, radiocarbon, radionitrogen and radio-oxygen, alpha, beta, and gamma. The proportions are exactly that predicted in a conglomerate mass undergoing the thermonuclear reaction called the ‘Solar Phoenix’ by Hans Bethe, its discoverer.

  “I believe that Phelps scanned it for the standard solar composition—Russell’s Mixture—and found the main components missing. But the standard composition is merely a by-product and not the main energetic reaction. If this thing taps the sun’s energy you would not expect a lot of ashes. “Now, gentlemen, turn this way,”

  They turned at his request and looked down the throat of a long latticework tube. It was eight feet in diameter and fully thirty feet long, somewhat resembling the raw framework of a dirigible,