Jupiter

by Carol

  There was a lake there, on that dry plain—or there seemed to be. It was a beautiful lake ruffled by little moving wavelets. Along its shores were odd trees. Beyond them loomed a city wall, covered with vines. And rearing up over the rampart were high buildings topped by carved pavilion-like structures, ornate as Burmese pagodas. Over it all was a sky, soft and blue as if it belonged to a summer evening on Earth—except for the many moons that hung in it, not almost-airless moons like those of the present, for each was clad in the cloudy veil of an atmosphere.

  And there was Jupiter, still three-quarters hidden below the horizon, but not streaked and cold anymore. It glowed with a dusky, luminous redness, and it seemed that I could feel its warmth.

  I knew then, at least, what the mirage, or whatever you care to call it, represented. Primitive Io, long before the last days—when the whole Jovian system was new. 1 had thought of those times, and here, somehow, it was crystallizing before me. Real.

  “Russ,” I gasped. “Russ—I see a city—like the ruins of the most ancient cities here on Io. The ones whose foundations you can hardly trace! Down there on the plain at the end of the gorge!”

  I pointed with an extended arm, while I babbled on, describing what 1 seemed to see. 1 was too bewildered to think of danger.

  Russ, beside me, gave a nervous grunt. Then he stammered: “No, I can’t make out—anything—Milt. But I feel damned—funny!…”

  He paused there, as if startled. Pretty soon he gasped in sheer surprise. “You’re right, Milt!” he grated. “I see it now—the city—the details filling themselves in, each one as you describe it. The lake, the wall, the vines! It’s what you’d imagine one of those oldest cities to be—from the ruins…And I see a city gate. People are coming out of it—goblin people, very slender and pallid, and without the great lungs and chests of their descendants. They’re like those original folk must have been! Except for their natural fur, white, and much less heavy than that of the last men, they wear no clothing—only metal ornaments. And I hear strange music…

  Russ and I stood there, staring, at the mouth of the gorge. And—it was funny! I hadn’t seen that gate my pal spoke of, before! But I did now! I hadn’t seen the people either, or heard the music. But these parts of the vision were all there, now, clear and vivid! It was as though everything was imaginary, somehow, though it all seemed so real, and that Russ’ descriptive words were helping my imagination to fill in the details. From what Russ had just said, it had been the same with him. He hadn’t seen the ancient city at all, until I had described it to him. Apparently, then, I had reached the nameless stage of being able to observe the impossible, a moment or so ahead of Russ.

  I was in a kind of drunken fuddle. The lake there, fascinated me. 1 saw goblin-folk wading into it, the cool water splashing around their thin knees…Suddenly I was aware of a tremendous yearning, stronger than any perhaps more logical fear.

  “Russ,” I mumbled. “The lake…Let’s go swimming. It’s been so damned long. Out here on Io we never could—before. Dust, and skeletons, and cold stars. That’s all we’ve been living with—for a month…

  Well, right then Russ Abfall began to swear at me. “You loony nut!” he shrilled at last in his cracked voice. “Don’t you realize this is all a fake—a mental phantasmagoria of some kind? It’s one of the enigmas of a dying race—something they must have employed in desperation! You don’t want to get mixed up any more than you are with something like that, do you?…That damned sun-plant—and what ever its underground-wires are attached to! Visions! Hallucinations! Somehow that hidden apparatus causes them! And we can’t even guess what kind of a hellish end this thing we’ve tangled with, can have! It must be like a drug—opium or hashish! It can’t work like them of course—but—”

  He stopped and stared at me. His tone was changed utterly, when he spoke again. “Milt,” he said in wondering simplicity. “You’ve got a swimsuit on.”

  I examined myself quickly. Yep, it was true! My heavy space armor had apparently vanished. And I was clad in a one-piece outfit of blue cellutex fabric, common on Earthly beaches. Looking at Russ, through that antique dusk and its weird illumination, I saw that he was rigged out just as I was! We were two contemporary Earthmen on primal Io!

  “You’re ready for the water too, I see, Russ,” I told him.

  His confusion was almost humorous when he looked down at himself. He swore rather weakly. Then he wheeled about, as if to search for the sun engine with his eyes. I looked too, but what 1 saw was—not a desolate expanse at the foot of the northern cliffs, but a dense forest. A soft mild wind blew against my body. And the stars overhead were pale…The mirage or hallucination had closed in on me almost completely.

  Russ’ voice was a bit odd, and far away, when he spoke; but 1 was sure that it, at least, was still real. Sure because of the worry in it, and the momentary groping for fact.

  “It isn’t there, Milt!” he was stammering. “The sun-plant, I mean…At least I can’t see it. Can you?”

  “No!” I shouted, straining, so that I would be sure to reach him. “I see just trees…”

  “So do I, Milt,” he returned. “It’s natural we’d imagine the same thing, there. Old Io. We both know the archeology, Milt. How things were…” And then Russ sighed in capitulation. “I wonder if it matters—really,” he continued. “Maybe you were right, Milt—about a swim. I’ve been a spaceman off and on for forty-one years. You get sick of things out here on these damned silent worlds sometimes—damned sick…His voice seemed to trail away.

  But I knew from my own experience just what was back of what he had said. Space. That awful nostalgia that grows on you. It was largely the humanness in old Russ, and the intriguing pull of the visions that had surrounded us, that had made him give up. And it was the same with me. We both knew that we were toying with something that justly should have made our flesh crawl; but we didn’t care. I wasn’t worried a bit. And I had the oddest idea that anything I wanted would happen.

  Russ and I walked down to the lake together. Or anyway seemed to. Perhaps we were already going our separate ways, along separate dream-channels, as our individual fancies dictated. We waded out into the water, mingling with those ancient Ionians. Their voices echoed around me, speaking a beautiful, liquid language. Or was it a language at all? Probably it was just a lot of pleasing sounds which my mind created for itself. But those ancients paid no attention to me, however—most likely because I wanted to think, alone—then. I swam far out from the shore, feeling the heady glory of that tropic night…

  Yes, I knew it was just a dream. But what did that matter? Pretty soon I began to wish that I wasn’t on Io—that 1 was back on Earth instead. Almost at once, then, the scene around me, vanished. 1 was riding a San Francisco belt-walk—one I knew well. Ahead of me, in the morning sunshine, was the new Farwell building, finished in 2314. Chet Robbins, an old friend of mine, was with me. He works for the Wenz Rocket Motor Company, and he likes magic.

  “Got a new card trick to spring on the gang tonight, Milt,” he was saying, his broad face all pleased goodnature. “It’s a real honey! Boy, it’ll make your eyes pop!”

  I’d never been able to catch on to those clever stunts of Chet’s, and sometimes this had made me kind of mad. But now, in this dream, I was sure I had him. All I had to do was imagine—for instance—the Farwell building floating up into the sky…

  I saw that two thousand foot spire doing just that. I heard a rending of metal, as the aerial street-spans connecting it with other buildings, parted. I heard people scream distantly. And I could see Chet’s face turn suddenly pale and foolish. He gasped, speechless.

  “Never mind, Chet,” I said, laughing. “I’ll bring it down again. And I did. A moment later the Farwell building was back in place on the ground once more, and the street-spans were intact. Chet was looking at me utterly flabbergasted.

  It made me feel a little silly. This wasn’t the real Chet Robbins at all. Petty revenge was out of place. So I shifte
d the scene again—I don’t remember to what.

  But it’s easy to see what I’d started for myself. Anything was possible in my imaginary environment I could imagine myself Caesar or Alexander the Great, if I wanted to, and my fancies would seem perfectly real around me. Historical accuracy would depend on my limited knowledge in each case, if history happened to be involved. For instance, I don’t know much about how Caesar’s Roman legions were organized, and their equipment is hazy to me—but still I could construct for myself a vivid living picture.

  I didn’t ever try Roman times more than briefly, but I tried countless other things. Pulled by a strong nostalgia, I relived fragments of my own life. I’d played football for California Tech, and I did so again, now. Saturday afternoons. Yelling crowds. Coach McKay giving us his hardboiled lectures. Fun and fight all over again. And then the training school at Vananis, Mars, where I’d learned to fly rockets. We’d had some nice blowouts—our class—in that quaint old city, which twenty-five thousand Earth people had colonized, replacing the Martian race, dead in some ancient plague. Dances. Parties. The faces of friends.

  Maybe it was all sort of silly. But it was relief from that lonely stay on lo, where not a real thing grew any more, except some rock lichens. And I could enjoy luxuries I’d never had before.

  Sometimes I remembered—danger. But not till I was aware of the passage of time, as dream succeeded dream, literally in thousands. Weeks, maybe months, must have already been used up by now. And I’d never emerged from that curtain of rosy visions, which I realized was the result of a science of the mind developed by the last men of Io, for a purpose of their own.

  And I wondered: “Where am I really? Where is my actual body? How is it feeding itself? What is it doing? There are air-purifiers in its space suit, of course; but there are so many other things to consider!”

  I didn’t know how to answer these questions. So, in moments of panic, I tried to break the spell of dreams, and fight my way back to the truth. It was then that I discovered that I was in a trap. I couldn’t get rid of those visions—or if it was possible to do so, it would require a tremendous effort. And I didn’t seem equal to that, now. Still, it didn’t seem to trouble me much. “What of it?” I kept telling myself. “What of it?” So my visionary magic carpet continued to function.

  But I wondered about old Russ Abfall. How was he faring? Doubtless his situation was the same as mine. Doubtless he was lost in a web of dreams, too. What were they like? I was pretty sure I could guess. Old Russ, weary of the life of a space man, wanted to retire. He wanted to build himself a laboratory on Earth, and spend the rest of his days in research for the improvement of space craft. It had been a dream of his since he was a kid. He’d hoped to win enough money from his various ventures in out-of-the-way corners of the solar system, to finance his costly experiments. So doubtless, now, he was getting a kind of vivid if unsubstantial fulfillment to his ambitions, just as I was frequently imagining the success of that interplanetary tourist line I wanted to start, if I ever had the means. There’d be contacts, people, movement and color. I’d own ships. I wouldn’t be just a space burn any more.

  Another thing about Russ. He’d had a wife once, when he was young. But she’d been killed, when they were married a year. Killed in the smash of a rocket plane racer she was piloting. Rhoda, her name had been. Once in a great while, Russ used to rave about her. He’d show me her picture then. She’d been dark and snappy, and pretty. Perhaps Russ was imagining himself with her now, young again…

  I was on the bridge of a big Earth-Mars Liner, giving orders as its captain, when, finally, the break in the dream-curtain came. From out of nowhere, I knew that a hand was on my shoulder, shaking it with insistent violence.

  “Hey, Milt!” someone was calling, in tones as faint as if they originated a thousand miles away. “Good night! We’ve got to snap out of this! If we don’t, it’s our finish, sure!”

  It was Russ, of course. I knew that voice was truly his, and not another phantom. I couldn’t see him, but I could tell how hoarse he was. When he stopped speaking, he began to cough. It was a hollow, horrible sort of cough, that made my blood run cold for a second. But terror starting up in me, caused me to make a mighty effort to win my way back to solid reality, and find out just what sort of a predicament we were in. 1 struggled furiously, using all the will I could muster. And the dream fought back.

  But at last those instruments on the control panels of my make-believe space liner began to grow faint and transparent. So did the comfortable fitting of the bridge. Sleek chromium fittings, and soft dark rugs and chairs, turned to ghosts, hovering at the vanishing-point. And around me, maintained only by force of will, was grim fact!

  I was in a deep, vertical shaft—a sort of well. Jagged walls of stone were around me, towering up toward a circle of daylight, far aloft. I was clad in space armor again. Russ Abfall was there beside me, leaning weakly against the wall of the pit. Io, it was, the real Io, though I’d never seen this excavation before.

  Instead of feeling languid and comfortable, though in tiptop shape, as I had a moment ago, I felt rotten! I was sick, and worn out with work and half starvation. My hands and arms—my whole body, in fact—were so emaciated they fairly rattled inside my space armor. Still I didn’t get the significance of all this—quite. Though I was pretty certain that, weak as I was, I could never climb out of this pit. I’d starve here—die of thirst.

  Naturally I looked to Russ for explanations—because he’s smart, figuring things out. “What’s it—all about, Russ?” I grumbled thickly, still battling to keep those comfortable visions out of my tired brain—visions I yearned for now in this hell-hole, as I had never yearned for anything before.

  Russ Abfall, probably because of his age, was in even worse shape than I was. His face, in his oxygen helmet, looked like the face of a corpse in a coffin. But he came through with the answers. He was too tired to be excited any more. But he spoke, swiftly, tensely, in his cracked and now hoarse voice, aware that we couldn’t hold onto real things for long.

  “You know what reverie, or daydreaming is, Milt?” he asked. “Naturally you do, but let me give my own definition: It’s a mental mechanism which enables one to escape from something unpleasant. If you’ve a routine kind of job that you don’t like, you generally do it while thinking about something nice.

  “The phenomenon that has tricked us is just a kind of reverie, enormously improved by artificial means. To understand its purpose here, you’ve got to understand the position of those last Ionians. The climate was bitterly cold. They had little food or water. The future prospect was hopeless. But still they wanted to keep going as long as they could—getting as much out of life as they could.

  “Some genius of a scientist found them the means. But in some respects, it’s an old trick to us on Earth. In a crude way, drugs like opium and hashish accomplish the same thing—produce dreams of strange beauty and vividness.

  “But agents other than drugs might do this far more perfectly, without, in themselves, putting one’s body out of kilter. We’re both sick, but from different causes.

  “The brain responds to quite a number of stimuli. When one has a fever—when one’s brain is being thrown off balance by heat—there’s a tendency toward the hallucinations of delirium. Sun spot radiations have long been believed to cause mental and emotional excitement, producing wars and other forms of mass and individual violence. Music—sound waves, enriched by tone and mathematical rhythm—soothe the mind and emotions, generally.

  “We must be dealing with a form of radiation here, Milt. Something that beats on the nerve and brain cells. The sun-plant, you know, and that concealed apparatus its electricity is fed into. It detaches the visionary part of our minds from fact, and allows our imaginations to roam, free, while the mechanical portions of our brain, and our bodies, can go on with unpleasant tasks.

  “That’s the way I’ve doped it out, Milt. It’s beautiful and insidious. But of course the mess we�
�re in isn’t the fault of the old Ionians—or their intention. We just got tangled with the Lethean influence they used on themselves, probably at the very last. We monkeyed with their sun-plant—and so, liberated again what might be called the drug of a hopelessly doomed and dying race.”

  Russ Abfall stopped speaking. He was panting heavily. My will tensed against the blur of visions trying to envelope me once more. 1 was looking around. Some of Russ’ explanation, I had worked out myself, when I had pondered in that dream region.

  I saw the walls of that deep well around me, grey and stark. Tools—blast excavators, which we had brought from our ship—were lying in the thick dust. We’d been digging here, perhaps for months. In the wall of the pit, chinks were cut, one above the other—a kind of ladder, going up and up. We’d been out of the pit often, going back to the ship for supplies, driven by some perhaps subconscious urge like sleepwalkers. We’d been working here, using up our strength until we were no longer able to climb out of that deep hole which we’d been digging deeper from some ancient Ionian beginning. We’d even rigged up a system of buckets and cables to remove the dust our blast-excavators knocked loose from the rock.

  “Digging down for water,” I grumbled. “Subterranean water which can’t be there any more. The lonians wanted water The urge to get it was stamped in the radiations of their reverie machine and—we got a dose of it too…

  “I think so” Russ commented.

  “But” I asked “what was it that snapped you out of the dream-world in the first place? Did you just realize and fight your way out or—?”

  Russ raised his right arm. I could see, even with the space suit sleeve around it, that it was badly swelled. “A falling rock dropped on my wrist,” he told me. “And the pain was strong enough to get through to me.