by Carol
He swung the mounting around and let loose a short, sudden blast of white fire along the naked deck of the battleship. Deep voices yelled within and men sprang out, to fall back with abrupt screams clogged in their throats as Ennis caught them in the intolerable blast from the projector. Men, shielded from actinic light, used to receiving only red and infrared, were painfully vulnerable to this frightful concentration of ultraviolet.
Noise and shouts burst from the derelict spaceship alongside, sweeping away eerily in the thundering wind that seemed to pound down upon them with new vigor in that moment. Heads appeared from the openings in the craft Ennis suddenly stood up to his full height, bracing himself against the wind, so dense it made him buoyant With a deep bellow he bridged the space to the derelict Then, as a squad of Maraks made their difficult, slippery way across the flank of the battleship toward him, and as the band that had boarded the spaceship crowded out on its battered deck to see what the noise was about, he dropped down into a crouch behind his ultraviolet projector, and whirled it around, pulling the firing lever.
That was what he wanted. Make a lot of noise and disturbance, get them all on deck, and then blow them to pieces. The ravening blast spat from the nozzle of the weapon, and the men on the battleship dropped flat on the deck. He found he could not depress the projector enough to reach them. He spun it to point at the spaceship. The incandescence reached out, and then seemed to waver and die. The current was shut off at the switchboard.
Ennis rose from behind the projector, and then hurtled from the flank of the battleship as he was struck by two Maraks leaping on him from behind the hump of the vessel. The three struck the water and sank, Ennis struggling violently. He was on the last lap, and he gave all his strength to the spurt. The water swirled around them in little choppy waves that fell more quickly than the eye could follow. Heavier blows than those from an Earthly trip hammer were scoring Ennis’ face and head. He was in a bad position to strike back, and suddenly he became limp and sank below the surface. The pressure of the water around him was enormous, and it increased very rapidly as he went lower and lower. He saw the shadowy bulk of the spaceship above him. His lungs were fighting for air, but he shook off his pretended stupor and swam doggedly through the water beneath the derelict He went on and on. It seemed as though the distance were endless, following the metal curve. It was so big from beneath, and trying to swim the width without air made it bigger.
Gear, finally, his lungs drew in the saving breaths. No time to rest, though. He must make use of his advantage while it was his; it wouldn’t last long. He swam along the side of the ship looking for an opening. There was none within reach from the water, so he made one, digging his stubby fingers into the metal, climbing up until it was safe to tear a rent in the thick outer and inner walls of the ship.
He found himself in one of the machine rooms of the second level. He went out into the corridor and up the stairway which was half-wrecked, and found himself in the main passage near the control room. He darted down it, into the room. There was nobody there, although the noises from above indicated that the Maraks were again descending. There was his weapon on the floor, where he had left it. He was glad that they had not gotten around to pulling that instrument apart. There would be one thing saved for intelligent examination.
The clatter from the descending crowd turned into a clamor of anger as they discovered him in the passageway. They stopped there for a moment, puzzled. He had been in the ocean, and had somehow magically reappeared within the derelict. It gave him time to pick up the weapon.
Ennis debated rapidly and decided to risk the unknown. How powerful the weapon was he did not know, but with atomic energy it would be powerful. He disliked using it inside the spaceship; he wanted to have enough left to float on the water until Shadden arrived; but they were beginning to advance on him, and he had to start something.
He pulled a lever. The cylinder in his arms jerked back with great force; a bolt of fierce, blinding energy tore out of it and passed with the quickness of light down the length of the corridor.
When he could see again there was no corridor. Everything that had been in the way of the projector was gone, simply disappeared.
Unmindful of the beat from the object in his hands, he turned and directed it at the battleship that was plainly outlined through the space that had been once the walls of the derelict. Before the men on the deck could move, he pulled the lever again.
And the winds were silent for a moment. The natural elements were still in fear at the incredible forces that came from the destruction of atoms. Then with an agonized scream the hurricane struck again, tore through the spot where there had been a battleship.
Far off in the sky Ennis detected motion. It was Shadden, speeding in a glider.
Now would come the work that was important. Shadden would take the big machine apart and see how it ran. That was what history would remember.
1939
THE LOTUS-ENGINE
Raymond Z. Gallun
Ray Gallun has written science fiction over a period of many years, but it has always been a very part-time affair for him. Gallun is a rover, and his stories are always written in bits and pieces in Paris, aboard ship* In some small town in the United States, somewhere in the Pacific—wherever he happens to be when the mood strikes him. For that reason most of them are short—the peripatetic author has trouble keeping manuscripts together—but memorable.
“We’ve got it started, Milt! The sun-engine’s running, after a billion years! Look! Darn it, look, Milt!…
My pal, old Russ Abfall, was dancing up and down there, in that dusty valley on the surface of Io, first large moon of the planet Jupiter. I could hear his high, cracked voice through the helmet radiophones of my space suit. His normally small eyes seemed very big, through the window of his own headgear, as he looked back at me along the cold, arid trail.
And his thin face was red with excitement, and maybe a touch of scare, too. Russ is past sixty. He’s been a hopeful space rover for better than forty years. But now he was acting as tickled as a kid.
I didn’t blame him, though I’m more phlegmatic than he is, and bigger—and red-headed and less than half his age. He used to say sometimes, that I—Milt Claire’s my name, by the way—missed a lot of the pleasures of life by not letting my feelings go, enough.
But I was plenty thrilled just then, too—and a bit uneasy and tense. I realized that we were confronted by a mystery that might easily prove dangerous.
A big, ugly-looking machine was working once more there in that valley, after its creators, the humans of Io—large-chested, furry, and goblin-like—had been extinct for an inconceivable time—the victims of a water famine on their dying world.
The thousands of reflecting mirrors of that solar motor, mounted on their slanted, circular frame, were collecting the feeble rays of the tiny, far-distant sun, and concentrating them on the blackened boiler at the center of the frame; The boiler was made like a squatting image of one of those last natives. It had a great beard carved out of iron, ruby eyes, long goblin nose and ears, and a strange, mocking, secret grin on its lips—a grin that was sinister in itself.
Steam, generated by focused solar heat, was turning a turbine, flywheel, and dynamo, the last shaped like a gigantic pocket-watch. Condenser coils were cooling the spent steam, and returning the water efficiently to the boiler.
It was all a most interesting spectacle—interesting, with a secretive threat in it somewhere…
Russ Abfall and I had gone out there to Io in a rickety space ship, Sun Spot, three months back. Our hope had been to explore that almost untouched Jovian satellite, and maybe And a deposit of some rich metal. Freelance space wanderers generally don’t brave the rigors of near-dead worlds, except for the very human reason of making money. That was our idea, backed up by certain lifelong dreams.
Our luck had exceeded our wildest optimisms. No, we hadn’t discovered a mine. Instead, we’d located a deserted, underground cit
y. Its galleries and chambers had been dug out of the sullen, almost airless hills, by those final Ionians. In it was a treasure-trove of small, easily transportable relics. Bowls, beautiful vases, queer clocks. Odd, ornate lamps that didn’t give light any more, because the radium salts in them had worn out with age. There was a fortune in the stuff, selling to museums on Earth, and to wealthy individuals making collections.
But we had stopped our feverish crating of ordinary antiques when Russ had found that solar engine, all but buried by an ancient rockslide from the desolate mountains. On two Ionian days—forty-two hours long, they are—we put in protracted work-shifts, digging the thing out of the rubble that had preserved it.
It must have weighed a hundred tons, even in that weak gravity. We could never get it carted back to Earth. It didn’t look like a good financial prospect. But lots of times enigmas are more fascinating than filthy lucre.
“We’ll never have any peace until we see whether the engine’ll run, Milt,” old Russ had told me. And I knew he was right. Though later 1 was aware we should have left well-enough alone.
So we’d polished the reflecting mirrors of the son-plant. We’d patched and repaired the leaks and dents in the boiler, turbine, and other parts. We’d filled the dried-out boiler from our ship’s precious supply of water. We’d applied oil liberally, where necessary. Just at evening we’d got that huge, tip-tilted reflector frame turned around on its pivot, so it would face the sun at dawn.
And now, coming back from our ship in the early afternoon, we were flabbergasted to see that world-old engine already in operation, its throttle evidently opened by an automatic device!
Russ Abfall scrambled around to the dynamo.
“Is it really delivering juice, Russ?” I demanded, running after him.
“Yeah! Plenty!” he responded after a moment, pointing through a glass-covered peephole in its side. Peering there, I saw fat blue sparks of electricity playing steadily about some peculiarly-formed metal brushes.
“But where is all that juice going?” I asked. “The Ionians didn’t use electricity much. They had those radioactive lamps to light up their digs, for instance.”
Russ shrugged and pointed to the enamel-insulated wires leading out of the generator, and into a heavy iron pipe that went right down into the rocky ground, to some hidden destination. Tracing it to its end would be difficult, if we wanted to avoid the possibility of breaking an important part of the whole mechanism.
“We’ll find out one way or another what’s happening to the current,” Russ reassured me. “Right now let’s watch—here. There’s enough to see.”
He spoke briskly, but I could tell he was getting worried. As for myself, I felt an unpleasant tautening of the hide along my back, and the nape of my neck. It was like a premonition of disaster.
There really was plenty to see, just watching the sun-engine itself. As the hours went by, a gear-system became active, turning and tilting the reflector frame on its pivot and gimbals, keeping the great iron ring and its mirrors faced toward the sun, so as to collect all the heat possible for the boiler.
After a while I went to a grotto nearby—part of that last Ionian city—while Russ, who is a much better mechanic and scientist than I am, stayed behind to keep an eye on the solar engine. For hours and hours I walked down bas-relief-flanked passages, and through gloomy halls, searching for some sign of where that electric current was disappearing to; but long search by the light of my ato-flash revealed no trace of an answer.
It was there, in that dust and silence, and wreckage of quaint household fittings, that a definite wave of intense mental discomfort came over me. It was as sudden as a hammer-blow. I hurried back to the surface, a vague suspicion in me becoming half conviction. It was already late afternoon.
Russ was walking around and around the sun-plant, his nerves and mind evidently responding to the same weird influence as were mine.
He had one arm drawn out of the sleeve of his space suit His hand, thus freed, was thrust up under the collar of his oxygen helmet, and this way he was smoking a cigarette.
“Something’s happened, Russ,” I grated. “But what?”
“I know it!” he returned, swinging around to face me. “I feel queer as the deuce, Milt! I’m all tense and tight inside; I want to do something, though just what it is I can’t say. I’ve got to get these arms and legs of mine busy. I can’t relax at all. It’s like I was about ready to explode!”
The sun plant. We both stared at it, accusation in our hearts. Russ was fingering the pistol at his belt, as though he wanted to fire a dynamium capsule at that ancient mechanism, and blow it to smithereens.
“Maybe,”,he said slowly, his voice shriller, even, than usual. “—maybe we ought to anyway shut this damned thing off. That electricity the dynamo is delivering—It’s going down there under ground. It’s energizing something. It’s making us feel the way we do…
“I suppose we should trace that pipe—that carries those wires—right away, Russ,” I added. “We’ll have to, eventually, 1 suppose, to see what kind of a funny apparatus they’re hooked to.”
Rocking on bis metal-shod heels, Russ seemed to consider; but he vetoed what I had suggested, at last, just as we’d both vetoed it before.
“No, not yet, Milt,” he said, barely audible, as though his heavy breathing made it hard for him to speak. “Some circumstance might turn up by itself, to explain everything to us. Meanwhile we can’t take the chance of wrecking any important works. If we did, we might never learn the—truth. This seems to be big stuff, Milt”
That ugly, bearded image, which was the boiler of the solar engine, grinned its secret grin. The sun was dropping lower and lower in the dark firmament It was already very close to the sullen hills. Soon, frigid darkness would come. Jupiter, as always, hung with just about one fourth of its great grey-and-red streaked disc above the horizon.
“It’ll be sundown soon, Russ,” I said, trying to reassure not only him, but myself as well—trying to ignore that increasing and nameless tension within me. “Then, deprived of energy to keep up steam, the engine’ll have to stop.”
I was right, of course. True to my predictions, the turbine and generator ceased turning at sunset. But the sinister spell that had come over Russ and me didn’t quit! Somewhere, energy from the power-plant must have been stored up, to operate whatever apparatus and force it was, that was acting on our nervous systems.
“I guess it’s about time to do something about—all this!” Russ grumbled, his voice wavering.
“Yeah!” I seconded.
I was thinking, somehow, of all the skeletons I’d seen on Io—and mummies, too. White-furred bodies, dehydrated and preserved by the dryness. Everywhere those old Ionians had died at their tasks. Digging canals and reservoirs to collect and hoard the precious water of the rare snows. The conditions under which they had lived, in those final days, must have been terrible. Yet many of the mummies still wore eternal and mysteriously happy smiles on their withered faces. The lonians seemed to have perished in joy. But why? How? In that question there was a blood-chilling enigma.
Well, we started back for our ship, to get our blast-excavators. We were going to dig down and see just what was hidden under the solar engine. But as we hurried through the swift-gathering night, I heard a dim rattle behind me, transmitted by the tenuous atmosphere.
Startled, we looked back at the machine—the sun-plant—which was now a hundred yards away. The whole frame of it was turning around slowly, majestically, a black, bizarre silhouette against the still-lighted west. It was turning to face the east—to wait for the dawn. Gears were moving it. As to where the power came from—well, I could guess on that point. An electric generator is built just about like a motor, and can serve as one, if electricity is fed back to it. So I figured juice was coming up along those wires that led into the ground—enough stored juice to revolve the dynamo and work the gears, turning the ring, and the reflector of the power plant east.
A
t sight of that eerie, automatic motion, Russ gave an inarticulate gurgle. We both knew then, that with its efficient steam condensers keeping the boiler always full, the engine could run every day, indefinitely, till it wore out. But we didn’t get a chance to discuss the situation, or to act. Strange events happened too suddenly, bewildering us.
I can’t say just what it was that reminded me, not of those final Ionians, but of their still more ancient ancestors, who had lived in the warm age of Io’s youth.
Maybe it was my increasing hatred of the starkness of my surroundings, and of the greater and greater menace in them.
I glanced along the mountain gorge, toward the small desert plain beyond, where those last cultivated fields of Io had been. I expected to see, in the harsh, bluish twilight, only those dry irrigation trenches, and the twisted iron pillars that had supported the glass roofs of those hothouse fields, smashed long ago by infrequent meteor showers. Beyond that mass of rock there, the cigar-shape of the Sun Spot should be resting, still hidden from view.
But—there was something else—collecting and forming against the picture of that dreary scene. Call it a kind of mirage—something that resembled a photograph superimposed upon another photograph by double exposure. And the second of the two was becoming more solid, more real, every moment