by Jerry
I shouted to Lona, who nodded wearily. We lifted straight upward with all the speed we could get from our monopters, nor did we even slacken pace until we had attained a height twenty thousand feet greater than the accepted “ceiling” of our monopters; but the cone of light stretched upward away from us still, seeming to reach the very stars—and at an elevation of eighty thousand feet there still seemed no way of winning free, and we could climb no higher. The air would not sustain the weight of our monopters, and from this grand and awful height we were compelled to remain and watch the slaughter of our people.
The clouds which went with the enemy monopters fell away from their myriad numbers when they had reached the airways above City of the East, and the monopters, in plain sight now, lifted skyward toward our hordes of defenseless people in and above Air Lane 50,000—and before the corps in charge of the Invisible Frontier could have seen what was happening, the enemy monopters were among our monopters, so that the rays from the Invisible Frontier would now have meant at the same time the wholesale slaughter of our own people. There was a chance that our people might win the fight in the air, I thought, and knew that the department heads of the Invisible Frontier must have thought likewise.
But it was hopeless. The enemy fell by thousands, yes; but where one enemy fell, fell a hundred of our people, free of their monopters, which had been burned away from around them by the mysterious rays used by the enemy, the occupants themselves burned to cinders even before they fell. Downward-drifting moths, their wings singed, their bodies lifeless and shapeless, soulless and lost! Black myriads, like feathers drifting earthward from a horizon-to-horizon flock of crows which is set upon by millions upon millions of fighting sparrows. The black clouds under which the enemy had launched its attack settled about the spires of the skyscrapers—and those spires vanished in a breath, disintegrated into invisible powder before our eyes, while our searchlights faded and died. Their operators, I knew instinctively, had died at their posts of duty, one by one.
From our place of imprisonment inside that cone, shut off from all our precious world, we witnessed the colossal destruction of the inhabitants of City of the East.
We watched until the last inhabitants of City of the East fell into the City to vanish in a breath as their falling cinder-bodies encountered the black clouds which hung about the skyscrapers. Then the enemy marshaled forces for the return to the submarines.
DARKNESS finally settled over all that remained of City of the East. Of all that vast myriad of white men and women, only Lona and I remained. But still the cone held us; and we were being drawn downward!
Looking up we knew the reason, for the cone was narrowing above us to become an ellipse, narrowing and retracting, drawing us in and down toward that pin-point of light whence came the light of the cone.
Swifter and swifter we dropped downward, forced by the narrowing, constricting cone, until we stood at last on the deck of that big submarine we had first seen.
Here men of color awaited us. They caught and removed us from our monopters, carried us into the heart of the metal monster, to stand before the grim commander of the invading Aliens—a great lump of a yellow man whose brow, smooth as an egg, was so ponderous as to be terrible, housing, plainly evident, such a brain as neither Lona nor I had ever before encountered.
“I am sorry,” he said in our language; “but it was all inevitable! The fortunes of war, my friends, and you have lost! As you are the last representatives of your race, I wish to express to you the high respect in which I have held you, and my sorrow that there was no half-way ground upon which we eould all meet. It was either you or we—and we have triumphed. As prisoners of war you are to be executed; but as a brave man and woman, who, I see, love each other, I leave you to choose the manner of your own departure from the world. You have all the time you desire in which to make your decision.”
So, locked together in a room far below the deck of the big submarine, together for our last hours on earth as we shall be together in death, we have written, in collaboration, this story of-City of the East. The commander of the Aliens has promised that it shall be published to the world, so that all living men, whatever their color, shall know of the wonder, the glory, the awesome grandeur of what was once the home of the white race—wonderful City of the East!
So it is finished, and tomorrow we die, Lona and I; but our death shall be glorious because of the promise of the commander of the Aliens. From the deck of the big submarine, which will emerge as part of the ritual of our passing, we will hurl ourselves heavenward in our monopters, which were not destroyed at our capture, to the very “ceiling”.
There, when we have gone as high as we can, we will face each other. My right arm will support Lona while, with my left, I remove the headpiece of her monopter; with a flirt of her hand she will do the same for me. Then we shall begin that long, plummeting descent toward the Atlantic, which will be, if our strength holds in the ascent, eighty thousand feet below us.
1928
WAR NO. 81-Q
Cordwainer Smith
It came to war.
Tibet and America, each claiming the Radiant Heat Monopoly, applied for a War Permit for 2127 A.D.
The Universal War Board granted it, stating, of course, the conditions. It was, after a few compromises and amendments had been effected, accepted by the belligerent nations.
The conditions were:
a. Five 22,000-ton aero-ships, combinations of aero and dirigible, were to be the only combatants.
b. They were to be armed with machine-guns firing nonexplosive bullets only.
c. The War Territory of Kerguelen was to be rented by the two nations, the United American Nations and the Mongolian Alliance, for the two hours of the war, which was to begin on January 5, 2127, at noon.
d. The nation vanquished was to pay all the expenses of the war, excepting the War Territory Rent.
e. No human beings should be on the battlefield. The Mongolian controllers must be in Lhasa; the American ones, in the City of Franklin.
The belligerent nations had no difficulty in renting the War Territory of Kerguelen. The rent charged by the Austral League was, as usual, forty million dollars an hour.
Spectators from all over the world rushed to the borders of the Territory, eager to obtain good places. Q-ray telescopes came into tremendous demand.
Mechanics carefully worked over the giant war-machines.
The radio-controls, delicate as watches, were brought to perfection, both at the control stations in Lhasa and in the City of Franklin, and on the war-flyers.
The planes arrived on the minute decided.
Controlled by their pilots thousands of miles away, the great planes swooped and curved, neither fleet daring to make the first move.
There were five American ships, the Prospero, Ariel, Oberon. Caliban, and Titania, and five Chinese ships, rented by the Mongolians, the Han, Yuen, Tsing, Tsin, and Sung.
The Mongolian fleet incurred the displeasure of the spectators by casting a smoke screen, which greatly interfered with the seeing. The Prospero, every gun throbbing, hurled itself into the smoke screen and came out on the other side, out of control, quivering with incoordinating machinery. As it neared the boundary, it was blown up by its pilot, safe and sound, thousands of miles away. But the sacrifice was not in vain. The Han and Sung, both severely crippled, swung slowly out of the mist. The Han, with a list that clearly showed it was doomed, was struck by a lucky shot from the Caliban and fell several hundred feet, its left wing ablaze. But for a second or two, the pilot regained control, and, with a single shot, disabled the Caliban, and then the Han fell to its doom on the rocky islands below.
The Caliban and Sung continued to drift, firing at each other. As soon as it was seen that neither would be of any further use in the battle, they were, by common consent, taken from the field.
There now remained three ships on each side, darting in and out of the smoke screen, occasionally ascending to cool the engines
.
Among the spectators, excitement prevailed, for it was announced from the City of Franklin that a new and virtually unknown pilot, Jack Bearden, was going to take command of three ships at once! And never before had one pilot commanded, by radio, more than two ships! Besides, two of the most famous Mongolian aces, Baartek and Soong, were on the field, while an even more famous person, the Chinese mercenary T’ang, commanded the Yuen.
The Americans among the spectators protested that a pilot so young and inexperienced should not be allowed to endanger the ships.
The Government replied that it had a thorough confidence in Bearden’s abilities.
But when the young pilot stepped before the television screen, on which was pictured the battle, and the maze of controls, he realized that his ability had been overestimated, by himself and by everyone else.
He climbed up on the high stool and reached for the speed control levers, which were directly behind him. He leaned back, and fell! His head struck against two buttons: and he saw the Oberon and Titania blow themselves up.
The three enemy ships cooperated in an attack on the Ariel. Bearden swung his ship around and rushed it into the smoke screen.
He saw the huge bulk of the Tsing bear down upon him. He fired instinctively—and hit the control center.
Dodging aside as the Tsing fell past him, he missed the Tsin by inches. The pilot of the Tsin shot at the reinforcements of the Ariel’s right wing, loosening it.
For a few moments, he was alone, or, rather, the Ariel was alone. For he was at the control board in the War Building in the City of Franklin.
The Yuen, controlled by the master-pilot T’ang, rose up from beneath him, shot off the end of his left wing, and vanished into the mists of the smoke screen before the astonished Bearden was able to register a single hit.
He had better luck with the Tsin. When this swooped down on the Ariel, he disabled its firing control. Then, when this plane rose from beneath, intending to ram itself into the Ariel, Bearden dropped half his machine-guns overboard. They struck the Tsin, which exploded immediately.
Now only the Ariel and the Yuen remained! Master-pilot faced master-pilot.
Bearden placed a lucky shot in the Yuen’s rudder, but only partially disabled it.
Yuen threw more smoke-screen bombs overboard.
Bearden rose upward; no, he was still safe and sound in America, but the Ariel rose upward.
The spectators in their helicopters blew whistles, shot off pistols, went mad in applause.
T’ang lowered the Yuen to within several hundred feet of the water.
He was applauded, too.
Bearden inspected his ship with the autotelevisation. It would collapse at the slightest strain.
He wheeled his ship to the right, preparatory to descending.
His left wing broke under the strain: and the Ariel began hurtling downward. He turned his autotelevisation on the Yuen, not daring to see the ship, which carried his reputation, his future, crash.
The Yuen was struck by his left wing, which was falling like a stone, The Yuen exploded forty-six seconds later.
And, by international law, Bearden had won the war for America, with it the honors of war and the possession of the enormous Radiant Heat revenue.
All the world hailed this Lindbergh of the twenty-second century.
OUT OF THE SUB-UNIVERSE
R.F. Starzl
EVERYTHING in this world is relative, with or without Einstein. Even time is relative. As Benjamin Franklin pointed out, the Ephemerid fly lives only twenty-four hours; yet leads a normal existence. During those twenty-four hours, it lives a full-time life, which, to the fly is of the same duration as a 60 to 70 year old life led by the human being. So too, is it with a microbe or microbe organism, which lives only a few minutes and then dies. These few minutes constitute a normal cycle. It simply lives much more quickly, although it does not realize it.
You can conversely imagine a race of super-beings on some other planet, which normally would live perhaps 10,000 years, as computed according to our time. To them our few years of allotted life would be incomprehensible.
Here is a charming story which contains excellent science and will make you understand a great deal about the atomic world, if you do not know it already. Also, it contains that most elusive jewel,—the surprise ending.
“IF you really are so anxious to go, I won’t keep you from going any more,” said Professor Halley with a sigh, to the young man who sat opposite to him in his laboratory. “Eventually it will become necessary for a human being to make the journey, and no better qualified than you to make an accurate report.”
“Indeed, I should think not,” smiled Hale McLaren, his friend and pupil, “as long as I’ve been your assistant, and, you might say, co-discoverer. But——” his eyes clouded, “I don’t know about Shirley. She wants to go along.”
“I think you should let her go along if she wants to,” said Halley slowly. “You know that I love my daughter even more than she loves you, but I realize that if you failed to come back, as our experimental rabbits failed to come back, she could never be happy again. She would rather be with you, no matter how inhospitable the little world to which you are going.”
“But I will come back!” insisted Hale McLaren urgently. “We know why our experimental animals did not return. As soon as they arrived on the surface of whatever little planet they happened to land on, they did not bother to wonder where they might be. They simply wandered on, and of course, it was impossible for our apparatus to find them again. You may be sure that I won’t leave the landing spot.”
“Nevertheless, it is possible you may fail to return. Shirley is almost a grown woman. We will explain the dangers to her, and if she still wants to go, she shall go.”
He stepped to the telephone and called the number of his home, only a short distance from the little inland college where he was head of the physics department. In a few minutes Shirley came into the presence of the two men and regarded their soberness amusedly.
“Whose funeral are you holding today?” she asked.
“Don’t talk of funerals at a time like this,” said McLaren, a little crossly. “We called you over here to explain to you again the danger of the trip you want to make with me. Frankly, I don’t want you along, but your father says you can come if you want to.”
“Of course I’m going!” she retorted with mock defiance. “Do you think I want to lose you to some atomic vamp?”
“This is serious,” he persisted, refusing for once to yield to her rallying. He led the way to the corner of the big, bare room, where he moved aside a denim curtain sliding on a wire, which hid a maze of enigmatic apparatus, evidently electrical in its nature. In the center of a large helix, on a base of peculiar translucent green material, stood a great glass bell, large enough for two or three persons to stand inside. A bank of high-voltage vacuum tubes against one wall was connected by means of heavy copper tubing to various points on the helix. The translucent green base was supported on a number of cylinders, which formed a hydraulic hoist so that the heavy green disc could be lowered in order to permit the introduction of objects under the independently supported bell.
“I’m going to start in a few minutes,” McLaren informed Shirley, and despite his assumed brusqueness, his voice betrayed a tremor of tenderness. “Your father is going to explain the danger to you, and if you still want to go, we start together.”
“You know, Shirley,” began Professor Halley in his best class-room manner, “that Hale and I have been engaging extensively in research work to discover the ultimate composition of matter. I will admit that we are as much in the dark regarding our primary quest as ever, but in our researches we have opened new vistas that are fully as beautiful and as interesting as the truths we first sought.
“By utilizing the newly discovered cosmic ray, which has a wave-length infinitely shorter than any other known kind of light, we have been able to get circumstantial evidence that elec
trons do not consist solely of a negative electric charge, as physicists have thought before, but that this charge is actually held by a real particle of matter, so infinitely small that we would never get direct evidence ot its existence by the older methods.
“While pursuing these studies, we stumbled upon another property of the cosmic ray. We found that certain harmonics of the ray, when enormously amplified, have the property of reducing or increasing the mass and volume of all matter, without changing its form. We have discovered no limit to this power. We believe it is infinite.
“Now this suggests a possible solution of the problem of the constitution of the universe. Could we prove that the atom, with its central nucleus and its satellites, called electrons, is really only a miniature universe, in fact and not by analogy only, we could safely assume that the constituents of the infra-universe beneath us and the super-universe above us are only links of a chain that stretches into infinity!”
Professor Halley paused. His assistant was flushed and enthusiastic, and his daughter’s cheeks glowed brightly and her eyes sparkled. But she was not looking at the apparatus; she was looking at the smooth, dark hair of her fiancé.
“We have sent things into that sub-universe,” he continued, “chairs, coins, glasses, bricks and things like that. And we have brought some of them back. But when we sent guinea pigs or rabbits, or a stray dog into the world of mystery, we could not bring them back. Hale thinks the animals may have wandered away, out of focus of our rays. I don’t know. He may be right, or they may have met some terrible unknown fate. Now he offers himself for the experiment. It is dangerous. It may be ghastly. But if you wish to go with him, you may. Your mother is dead. You may leave me lonely in my old age; but you may go—for science!”
A solemn hush followed the simple words. Then Shirley said clearly: “I will go.”