by Jerry eBooks
With Danton on board the voyage was bound to be bad anyhow. With Howell also on board, it would be explosive. Jimmy contemplated the future with a violent indignation. He couldn’t be philosophical about it. For instance, when the Carilya lifted and they watched the surface of the earth change from a seeming flat plane to a monstrous bowl, and then finally flicker into its actual shape of a colossal ball, Danton was watching with him from a stem-port. When the Earth looks like a ball, you’re in space.
“Now,” said Danton, grinding his teeth, “Jane knows I can’t watch her! But she can’t take up with Howell, anyhow! Bad luck for him!”
JIMMY walked away. He kept busy while the Carilya went cautiously up beyond the plane of the ecliptic, meteor-detectors out, and then sighted on Dabla and went into overdrive. In overdrive she was safe from any external accident, but she was absolutely on her own. If anything happened short of her destination, it would be just too bad. Overdrive speed is so huge a multiple of the speed of light that it would take forty times the whole Space-Guard fleet six months to search along the path a ship should cover in a day. So if the Carilya didn’t turn up in port, there’d be no use looking for her. She’d be gone. Period.
Jimmy didn’t worry about that. A spaceman doesn’t. You face failure of machinery when you have to. But it isn’t only in prison that men go stir-crazy. Locked in a beryllium-steel hull, hurtling endlessly through the featureless nothing that is overdrive, nerves crack and men quarrel for no reason. Any one of the thousands of theories about the Lost Race is good for a fist-fight on any space voyage any day. More than once a man has jumped hysterically out of an air-lock for no cause that sober sense can fathom. Many a ship has come to port with its crew fitter for an insane asylum than the tedious examinations they have to undergo to make sure they haven’t hidden morsels of the ship’s fuel in their possessions or even their bodies. And the situation on the Carilya was bad from the beginning.
But after one week’s journeying, the stars winked into being and the Carilya was only some fifty million miles from Dabla, which was good astrogation. The Carilya reported by space-radio and of course her crew-members had the privilege of sending personal messages back to Earth. The messages would go by the first ship to make the run-on overdrive, of course.
Jimmy got his message off. Howell, he noticed, sent nothing. Danton grinned unpleasantly at Jimmy after the Carilya went back for more weeks of travel in the weird half-reality which is overdrive.
“I sent Jane a message,” said Danton, chuckling. “Told her I’d been hurt a little in an accident involving Howell and myself. She’ll read that as a fight. And she knows me! She’ll figure that if it’s started already, one of us won’t come back! And she won’t know which to expect! She’ll keep busy wondering.”
Jimmy said coldly:
“Do you intend that only one of you will go back?”
“It’s my intention,” snarled Danton, “to figure out some way to get aground and stay where I’ll know what is going on! If only I get a chance to clean up.”
Jimmy shrugged and moved away. Danton wouldn’t have admitted murderous intention, of course. If he had any such plan, he would make devious, elaborate arrangements for a seeming accident to Howell. And he’d have nearly a year of maddening space-travel in which to contrive it. The psychology of men in space is the psychology of men in prison, with nothing to think of but crazy grievances and wild plans for impossible actions. It was just important enough for Jimmy to sound Howell out, indirectly.
“What do you think about?” he asked Howell in apparent casualness. “You don’t read a lot. You don’t play games. You don’t do much talking. What do you do with your mind?”
Howell looked at him and shrugged.
“I don’t think about Danton, if that’s what you mean,” he said evenly. “I’d crack up. I used to, sometimes—Jane and the trick he played to make her think I’d married a space-port floozie before I shoved off, one time. But that’s not healthy to remember.”
“What do you think about, then?” demanded Jimmy.
“The Lost Race,” said Howell drily. “I’ve read everything that anybody’s ever written about the Lost Race, and listened to all the crazy theories that have sprung up in ships’ forecastles. I’m trying to fit them together and throw away the stuff that cancels out, to see if there’s anything left.”
Jimmy was relieved. A man who puzzles over the Lost Race can go crazy—it’s happened—but he isn’t objectionable. The pursuit leads to an argumentative streak and impassioned convictions, but nobody can be expected to do anything about it.
THE LOST RACE, of course, is that unknown breed of creature which built the smashed cities on Mars, and the smashed installations on Titan, and the blown-up cities on the Centaurean planets, and the utterly devastated ruins on Sirius Four and Arcturis Three and some hundreds of other oxygen-atmosphere planets. Maybe they built on earth, but if so a hundred thousand years of the Earth’s climate has wiped out their traces. Their ruins are found in an area two thousand light-years across. They had metals and alloys—scraps of which have markedly advanced human metallurgy—and they built roads and dug canals and moved earth and stone in incredible masses. They must have mastered space travel, and they must have had arts and possibly music and literature. But above all they had a genius for the destruction of their own edifices, so that all that is left is rubble and dust. It is as if they committed suicide some fifty to a hundred thousand years ago, and painstakingly destroyed every vestige of their civilization in the process. And nobody knows any more than that.
“Are you getting anywhere?” asked Jimmy. “I wouldn’t mind hearing a new guess about them.”
Howell shook his head.
“They weren’t like us,” he said. “If we land on a new planet, somebody’s sure to scribble on a bit of rock, ‘John Smith of Earth stood here, June 28, 1994.’ We like to leave evidence of ourselves. If we knew the human race were going to die out, we’d probably tidy everything up and try to prepare records for somebody—or something—to find a million years from now, so they’d admire us. The Lost Race didn’t. They wanted to end. They wanted the universe to be as if they had never existed.”
“It’s been offered that they were exterminated,” objected Jimmy, “by another race that hated them.”
Howell shook his head.
“The exterminators would have left a boast if they’d hated them,” he said drily. “Mere destruction wouldn’t have been enough. Genghis Khan built a pyramid of skulls, after his enemies were destroyed, to make a boast. Maybe they just got fed up with themselves.”
Jimmy abruptly told him of Danton’s message to his wife Jane. Howell said evenly:
“What of it? I’d like to do something for Jane, but that doesn’t necessarily mean doing something to Danton. After all, he’s doing that pretty thoroughly himself. I couldn’t possibly avenge myself as thoroughly as he’s doing for me. And if he does kill me, he’ll pay for it, and I don’t particularly care.
Jimmy had a queer conviction that Howell meant it. But he didn’t feel at ease. The voyage was beginning to have its effect upon him, too. The first month or so always fixes the pattern for the rest. Danton had an occupation in his morbid suspicion of his wife and—this voyage—his hatred of Howell. It was not a healthy occupation, to be sure. Howell speculated on the Lost Race. Other members of the crew carved plastic or wrote poetry or did anything at all to keep from being bored to insanity. Something had to be done.
The Carilya hurtled on in overdrive. Days passed. Weeks passed. One month. Six weeks. Then—
They came out of overdrive and gazed fascinatedly through the ship’s ports at the stars. There were no longer any familiar constellations, but there was a yellow sun off to port with at least three planets. The Carilya, headed toward the sun, its meteor-detectors weaving restlessly through space. The Space-Guard was undermanned and short of ships, so the licensing of a voyage usually stipulated a landing or two for first-contact reports. Th
e Guard was feverishly expanding its explorations in hopes of finding a Lost Race city that wasn’t completely smashed and in the effort was hopping from one star-cluster to another without exhaustive exploration anywhere. So commercial ships were called on to do surveys the Guard couldn’t at the moment attempt. It was safe enough, certainly. The Lost Race had left behind no other race that might be mimical to man. First-landings were still so commonplace that at least a dozen times a year a freighter turned up with news of an Earth-type planet that could be colonized, and her skipper hopefully applied for full property rights in a world as large and perhaps as rich as the home of the human race.
A FOURTH and fifth planet turned up as the Carilya neared the yellow sun. But Number Two had seas and cloud-banks and a polar ice-cap. The Carilya swung up to it, matched velocity, and prepared to descend.
Then it checked. An infra-red scanner had found a huge area barren of all vegetation. The Carilya swung round the world’s bulge to descend beside that place, which could be nothing but another blasted city of the Lost Race.
A mile up, Jimmy Briggs saw an oddity. It was a stretch of unshattered highway with a round, unpulverized area at its end. He called the control-room and pointed it out, but the Carilya did not adjust again. She went on down and down, slowly and gingerly, and at last grounded with a barely perceptible bump. Then a pause. Gravity, magnetic, and barometric readings. Air-analysis. Needless, this last, because Lost Race ruins were found only on oxygen-type planets. A bacteria-type test. Then—
“All clear to land, if you wish,” said the skipper’s voice over the speaker-system.
Jimmy Briggs got ready to go outside and breathe fresh air. He was sticking a blaster in his pocket when Howell came to their joint cabin.
“I heard your report on that funny business astern,” he said. He looked animated. “I got a squint at it myself. It looks like there was a rise of ground between it and the city proper, and the blasts that smashed the city missed it. It won’t be true, of course, but we might look!”
“Sure!” said Jimmy. “My idea exactly!”
Danton came out of the engine-room as they went by. It occurred to Jimmy that he hadn’t seen Danton in days. There were only eight men on the ship, but once in the absolute eventlessness of overdrive, it was possible to miss seeing any one of them. Danton locked the engine-room door behind him. His eyes glittered as he looked at Howell. Jimmy realized that he’d had nearly two months of brooding, with a pathological case of jealousy to start with. He nodded briefly and hurried out of the air-lock.
“I never thought to ask you,” he said curtly. “Do you run into Danton often?”
Howell said without emotion:
“I’ve no need to, and I avoid him when I can. He’s played dirty tricks and he’s going crazy, in his own way. I think his suspicion of Jane is a result, and not a cause. I worked out something about the Lost Race that might apply to him.” He enlarged on his theory as they left the ship and started walking. Jimmy smelled green stuff and growing things. He barely glanced at the desolate square miles of rubble that had been a city. To land on a planet which was not Earth was no longer a novelty, and surely Lost Race ruins were not oddities any longer. The two men from the Carilya pushed through knee-high stuff like moss, looking for the highway Jimmy thought he’d glimpsed from the air. A hundred-foot hummock with giant canes clothing its near side was the clue. A quarter of a mile, and they found shattered stone road surface underfoot.
“It comes out of the fact that there is precognition,” said Howell, tramping along beside Jimmy. “There is foreknowledge of things to come. It’s been proved. It’s a function of the subconscious mind. Besides the demonstrable cases, we have hunches we can’t account for, and fairly often they work out.”
Jimmy nodded, sniffing pleasurably and looking about him as he moved on.
“Surely! Hunches are precognition—except when they’re wishful thinking,” he agreed.
“And we have consciences,” Howell went on. “They’re functions of the subconscious, too. It’s not far-fetched to guess that a bad conscience is a leak from the subconscious, which sees some bad breaks coming as a result of some dirty trick we’ve played. On that basis, Danton has a bad time because his subconscious is warning him of something unpleasant in the offing. He can’t read the warning clearly. He’s got precognition of disaster, but he can’t or won’t recognize its cause. So he’s scared. Jealousy is a form of fear. If conscience doth make cowards of us all—because it’s precognition—then it’ll make some of us insanely jealous.”
“Let’s not think about Danton just now,” said Jimmy. “Look!”
A HORNED beast stared at them, and broke into headlong flight, then spread giant wings and flapped over a nearby forest-edge and vanished. Jimmy blinked.
“You’ve got a blaster in case of need, and so have I,” Howell said, dismissing the beast without comment and taking up his theme again. “What I really worked out was that maybe the Lost Race died of finding out the future. We humans have courage to go on because we don’t know the future. If our fathers had foreseen all they were going to have to endure in the Third World War, for instance, they couldn’t have taken it. Not knowing, they only had to meet it moment by moment, day by day, and they lived through it and stayed sane.”
Jimmy mumbled an agreement.
“Suppose the Lost Race saw the future in its entirety?” Howell continued. “Suppose they saw the inevitable result of something they’d done? It was in the future. They couldn’t avoid it if they lived on into that future. Suppose they saw—oh, suppose they saw that the atomic power they had been using had altered their germ plasm and that their race was due to turn into a race of monsters which they considered horrible and obscene. What would they do?”
Jimmy looked startled. “I suppose they’d commit suicide.” Then, surprisedly, he said “They did!”
“Right!” said Howell. “There’s a new theory of what happened to the Lost Race! It may be nonsense, but it explains everything, even to the smashing of their cities so that no race which followed them could duplicate their civilization and share their fate.”
Suddenly, the highway underfoot ceased to be rubble. It was behind the hundred-foot hillock. And it was absolutely unbroken. Crawling green things grew over it, but they had not cracked it. And ahead there was a roofless structure, neither shattered nor smashed nor damaged save by creeping vines which grew upon it.
The two of them fell silent. Jimmy drew a quick breath. They had come upon an artificial amphitheatre built by the Lost Race, unharmed unless by time. It faced a metal hood not unlike a bandstand shell both in size and form. Before the hood there was a small object like a podium. They gazed.
“This,” said Jimmy, “is It! A thing the Lost Race didn’t smash! We take photos and get them to the Space-Guard. They will go happily insane! What is it, do you suppose?”
“It looks like a lecture platform,” said Howell humorously. “Maybe they listened to lectures until they all went mad. But that thing yonder puzzles me!”
They climbed over lush vegetation to the podium-like object some three and a half feet high. It was of metal, and it looked rather like a seat, too, but no human could have sat comfortably in it. It slanted sharply, and there was a carved-out slot as if for a tail to rest in it. Howell climbed up and sat awkwardly in it, his legs dangling over. Then he gasped.
The hollow part of the bandstand shell was no longer hollow. A thick mistiness filled it, swirling strangely here and there.
Howell leaped out of the queer seat. The mistiness vanished instantly. He looked at Jimmy, and then looked back. They poked around, wordless and not quite believing.
Then Jimmy said abruptly, “I’ll try it!” and climbed into the seat.
Mists swirled again. They were vaguely colored and there were traces of form, here and there. Jimmy said, “The Skipper’ll have to see this! I wish he were here now!”
Then the mists cleared—and the Skipper was there! The mists
had coalesced into his form! He stood outside the air lock of the Carilya, also plainly in view inside the metal hood. He was full-size and in three dimensions. He was talking to Danton.
Jimmy gaped, and slid off the seat. The Skipper and Danton and the visible part of the space-ship vanished together. Instantly.
“Television?” Howell said. “Still working after a hundred thousand years?”
Jimmy gulped. He blinked. He’d thought of the Skipper and wished to see him—and he’d seen him!
“I—thought of the Skipper—” He swallowed. “I—tuned him in by thinking of him—Wait a minute!”
HE CLIMBED into the seat again, broke into headlong flight, and then within this bandshell hood on the unnamed planet of a merely numbered sun, he saw the signing-on office in the spaceport back on Earth. He recognized the man administering the psycho test to somebody wearing the psycho mask. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head. He opened them again.
The spaceport office was wiped out. He looked into the livingroom of Sally’s home. Sally came in the door. While he watched hungrily, she went to the little Viewer Jimmy had given her and flicked the lever. Jimmy saw his own image on the viewer-screen, some hundreds of light-years distant, moving in the vision-recording he’d made for Sally to remember him by! He slipped off the seat.
“It—went all the way back to Earth!” he said thickly. “You try it!”
“One creature could show thousands of others what he tuned in on,” Howell said oddly. “One person or creature had to control it.” He paused. Then. “Go back and tell the Skipper, Jimmy.”