by Earl
Rhea, the second largest of Saturn’s moons, was much closer to the ringed planet. But it was very small, a midget to even Earth’s Moon. Renolf pursed his lips at the density reading. It was so tiny that even in its prime it could not have been a hundredth of Earth’s.
“Yet it has a high percentage of oxygen,” commented Renolf. “And to creatures of a huge lung capacity, in combination with a low metabolism rate, it might have been sufficient to support life. An animate life of possibly dragging tempo to Earthly senses. They might have been sluggish creatures—slow and ponderous in movement, slower than even snails. But they could have risen to an intellectual peak just as high as anywhere else, given time. And of that, Heaven knows, they had plenty.”
IT WAS with something of a shock that they found on little Rhea transparent hemispherical domes exactly similar to those of Titan. As though it was a cosmic type of mushroom that had blown from planet to planet. Renolf guided the ship down below the dome through a convenient hole. His interest had risen to fever pitch. Dora looked at him with something of a vindicated air. Plainly, it came to her, the people of Titan had migrated.
Then Renolf’s voice shattered her thoughts. “No, not the same after all. The dome is the same, yes, suggesting that the two races had intercommunication, and exchanged certain things. But the architecture—see that bulbous, punctured metal-tiered thing, for instance. Radically, utterly different from the slim towers of Titan’s race. And the walls—notice they are decorated with tinted reliefs. Titan’s walls were barren, harsh, in comparison. These people had a highly developed artistry. Those of Titan either had not, or had discarded it in some stage of their evolution.”
Renolf was right; Dora could see. Even her less keen perceptions told her that. “But is it possible,” she spoke defiantly, “that part of Titan’s peoples moved here, developing a different architecture?”
Renolf smiled, whether in scorn or silent agreement, the girl could not tell. Then he plunged the ship into the void again. This time they swung past Saturn, above his rings, and swept far out into space. When the huge planet had dwindled to a moon-sized ball of yellow agate, another small satellite hove into view. Iapetus, about Rhea’s size, was more than two million miles from the body it revolved around!
Though similar in most respects to the last satellite they had visited, they sought in vain for signs of former life. Dora wearied of the endless peering and began reading. She looked up hours later to find Renolf staring perplexedly downward.
“Strange,” he said, catching her eye. “Yet the solution must lie in the fact that this body lies so far from Saturn, With the meager actinic radiation it gets from the Sun and from Saturn, it simply wasn’t able to support a thriving evolution. A starved wastrel. An abortive world. I can throw it in the category of the asteroids.”
Dora stretched. Then the clock, a large one, chimed an hour. Renolf looked at it and then at the girl. Without a word he removed his headband. In another moment he was kissing his young wife passionately. It was the eight-hour period in which he belonged to her.
To be concluded.
SPAWN OF ETERNAL THOUGHT
Concluding a two-part story of super-space
IX.
DORA awoke with a start. She sensed that something had awakened her. Not the stroke of the clock, nor any interior noise. It had been something else. Staring around, everything seemed normal. Her husband lay peacefully asleep in the other bunk. But something had——
She shrugged and stepped to the window, graceful as a fairy, in Iapetus’ puny gravity. Low on the horizon Saturn and his shimmering halo were slowly ascending, for this satellite had a period of rotation. Dora drank in the beauty of the scene. Long, silvered shafts of xanthic light crawled over the barren topography outside the ship. Even that desolate landscape was beautiful under the magic touch of an alien pseudosun.
Near by, towering a hundred feet, were the beetling cliffs under which Renolf had parked the Comet, as a measure of protection against meteors. Yet Dora saw that the repulsor screen’s recorder showed a terrific discharge. A huge meteor had plunged at the ship. The valiant, atomic-powered screen had shunted it aside.
Suddenly the girl gasped, as her eyes turned to the other side of the cabin. From out that port she saw a confused mass of crystalline matter blocking the light. Frightened, she awoke Renolf. The latter blinked his eyes and then ran to the forward compartment. When he returned, he was grinning.
“Nothing serious, honey. Just a mere matter of maybe a thousand tons of rock falling on the ship! Saw the jagged missing patch in the cliff’s face from the front nose port. Look at that gauge, will you? Ten thousand milli-ergs of repulsion! Why that must have burned up a full ounce of sand fuel! Enough to feed the engines from here to Halifax. Such expense!”
Dora slapped him playfully. “Silly! But really, Vince, for a minute, when I saw that mess out there by the window, I didn’t know what to think.”
“A mere dust heap to our repulsion screen,” deprecated Vincent. “It’s designed to turn away instantaneously a meteor outweighing the Comet a thousand times at one tenth the speed of light.”
“What made the cliff fall anyway?”
“A meteor, of course.” Vincent turned to look again at the jumbled debris beyond the side port. For a long moment he stared—and wondered. For what he had neglected to tell Dora was that a meteor, in plunging into the hard, crystalline mass of the cliff, would have sprayed it in a molten form far and wide.
Something else had caused that collapse of rigid rock. Either a fault in its grain, or—the menace! An odd thought. An impossible thought. Yet the staring man could not rid himself of it. There had grown up in him, in these past few weeks, a feeling that they were being watched. That the course of the Comet had been followed by other-worldly eyes. At times Renolf, with the headband on, had seemed to feel a prying finger in his mind. As though the menace, whatever and wherever it was, were tabulating, recording, his innermost thoughts. It had been an eerie feeling.
And now this sudden collapse of a cliff that had stood for ages—— Was it a warning?
FOR AN HOUR they were busy and happy with the bustling of daily ablutions and a breakfast. Vincent’s absences as the super-Renolf were really a tonic to their companionship. It made them more appreciative of each other. Finally the young husband reached for the headband with a sigh. He was sorry to part company with his wife, yet the urge of the super-Renolf was not to be denied.
“We’ve checked off the list the first three of our scheduled stops,” said Renolf as he skimmed the Comet away from little Iapetus. “And they are the outermost ports of call in the solar system, from a biological viewpoint. I had not originally planned it, but out of curiosity I wish to touch upon Saturn itself, and see what there is to see.”
There proved to be little to see in the blinding haze of Saturn’s thick and writhing atmosphere. Where the atmosphere ended, and the “ground” began was a moot question, as the giant planet was little more than semiviscous liquid. And Renolf did not care to stay long when he saw his companion flushed and miserable from the great heat which worked through the insulated hull.
But before they left, they came upon an “island” of solidified material on the boiling seas—yet in area it was probably more in aggregate than the total land surface of Earth! In the central portion of this land mass they were amazed to find a prolific plant and animal life. It was the Carboniferous Age of Earth brought back to life! They stayed only long enough to observe a few dozen scaled beasts haunting the tremendous fern forests.
“Behold!” said Renolf. “A life at its near beginning! From those monsters will one day come a race of thinking beings. It is one of Nature’s laboratories.”
Renolf consulted his complicated space charts and set a course. “Now for Jupiter and his moons. Fortunately, that planet is at present on the same sun side as Saturn. Saves us considerable time.”
Yet it took the silvery Comet three weeks to leap the enormous gap betwee
n Saturn and Jupiter. Now and then the repulsor dials showed a sudden discharge. Meteors, stones of space, ricocheting off harmlessly. The terrific momentum loosed at such semicollisions—enough to knock the Comet degrees off its course—was almost wholly buffered. Inside they felt but the faintest of jars. Dora vaguely understood that it was scientific magic that could so ease the otherwise great shock—Renolf’s scientific magic.
TIME did not drag. Time only drags when there is boredom. There could be no boredom in space. Not when each glance at its manifold mysteries occasions a limitless train of wondering thought.
The giant among planets, with its great “red eye” gleaming at them cryptically, Jupiter dissolved out of the void rapidly. Renolf laid a course immediately for Europa, fourth largest of its nine moons.
Smaller than Earth’s Moon, it proved to have an atmosphere as tenuous as Titan’s had been. Strangely, however, the oxygen content was low. So low that even in its younger days it might have been unable to support life. It had a queer topography, too—displaying remnants of mountain chains that must once have been very great. And a dull, rusty coloring lay over the whole satellite. As though some cosmic giant had sprinkled red pepper over it, preparatory to eating it whole.
Signs of former civilization were rare. The two Earthlings sensed that something on this small world had prevented its full development as an abode of life. Age-old ruins gave the impression of a culture that had never gotten much above what Earth had even then, in her short life.
“Another mystery here,” reflected Renolf. “A civilization throttled at birth, so to speak. Something brought about its doom long before the hand of Time had chilled their planet.” He pursed his lips. “One thing, though—Io, the next nearest moon, is close indeed. The answer might lie there. When rival civilizations lie only 150,000 miles apart——”
And the answer did lie on Io. An answer more lucid than Renolf could have dared to hope. Fed throughout the ages by Jupiter’s life-giving rays, and very close to it, Io had evidently enjoyed a long period of propitious life. Its topography, too, was jumbled, jagged. From a distance its surface looked like the pitted surface of Earth’s Moon. Yet it must have sheltered a numerous race, for its ocean beds were not extensive, and around them were immense areas of level land. In the ages gone they had been fertile farm lands.
Coming upon their first relic of former civilization, Dora gasped incredulously. Even Renolf jerked his eyes wide. If the transparent domes of Titan and Rhea had been gigantic, these man-made dwellings on Io were super-colossal. For a hundred miles in either direction squatted an unbelievable mass of solid structure. In height it could have been no less than a mile.
Dora blinked her eyes in disbelief. A solid building doubtless capable of holding all of Earth’s population at once! At widely separated intervals on the perfectly level roof were smaller square buildings, like chimneys of an apartment house.
For a moment the girl thought she saw smoke coming from them. Then the incongruousness of the thought shook her with silent laughter. For, obviously, the structure was no more than an ancient relic. A forgotten tomb, like the hemispheres of Titan had been. Meteors had crashed through the roof in countless numbers, and when Renolf brought the ship lower, it looked like a sieve.
Renolf nodded. “Another example of rational life’s tendency to become independent of Nature. In this sort of community house, a world in itself, the intelligence of Io lived on after their world had refused to nourish them further. What a great science this represents!”
AT the first opportunity, of course, Renolf slid the Comet through a meteor-made rent in the roof, for a glance at the interior. To their surprise, there was light below. They looked up startled to see the heavens as though nothing were between them. “What a great science indeed,” breathed Renolf. “When it could produce a substance transmitting light and radiation only one way! Here they lived as though out under the stars. Yet protected from the cold and airlessness that came over their dying planet.”
“But why,” asked Dora, “should such a tricky one-way glass be used? Why not the transparent domes of Titan?”
Renolf shrugged. “I cannot fathom their every secret. Perhaps they had enemies whose prying vision must be shielded off. More likely something we cannot understand.”
Renolf dropped the Comet through the great hole torn out by the meteor. On all sides they saw a maze of chambers. Their contents, not made of the resistant stuff of the walls, were in every stage of ruin. It was mostly dust. The huge structure was a honeycomb plundered by time of its formerly precious contents. A husk, like a petrified sponge.
Then they came upon large lateral tunnels in the depths of the building. Probably the means of transport from one part of the unit city to another, they stretched endlessly. With the perfect transparentness of the structure’s skeleton, allowing the somber light of overhead Jupiter through, Renolf guided the ship along one tunnel. He was careful, not knowing what lay ahead.
Chilled by some somber thought, Dora suddenly noticed the ship had come to a halt. She looked around. Renolf was staring out of his side port eagerly. Dora went to his side. Then she saw too what had disturbed even the emotionless super-Renolf.
The tunnel, like an artery to a great heart, had opened abruptly into a Gargantuan-cleared space. It was like the courtyard of a castle. In the emptiness that reared a mile upward to the very roof was a slender column of stone. But slender only in comparison to its height. By Earthly measurements it would be capable—were it hollow—of holding four Empire State buildings, one on top of the other.
“What is it?” asked the girl involuntarily.
“A glorified totem pole,” answered Renolf quickly. “See?—it is carved and arabesqued. And more”—he brought the ship closer to it—“on it is engraved a form of writing! Lord, if I could only decipher it! Perhaps the whole history and science of this race are there in letter forms!”
It was possible at that, for the writing was small. The indelible records of a dead race, inscribed on imperishable material! The alien words seemed to spiral around the column. One could then start at the top, and given enough time, read to the bottom, without having to turn a page or ransack libraries.
Imbued with a desire to test his theory, Renolf raised the ship in the open space around the pillar. Just below the roof, it ended in an elaborately carved stoa. The figures of the group were strange and shocking to Earthly eyes, resembling no creature of Earth. But Renolf was more interested in their records than their physical form. He came upon the beginning of the writing.
THEN an exclamation was wrung from his lips. He brought the Comet closer, not a yard from the column’s surface. “Look! This is not writing, as the lines below are. This is a form of hieroglyphics—ideographs—like the Egyptians used!
“It is a record made for alien eyes to see and understand. That must be the sun symbol—a small circle and radiating lines. There’s Jupiter—circle with wavy lines and an elliptical red spot. A space ship—see that?—a windowed globe with dots around it. Why, with a little concentration, I should be able to get the drift of the meaning behind those symbols!”
And the upshot of this discovery was that the Comet hovered around the inscribed column for two weeks. Upheld by its diamagnetic auxiliary engine, it crawled beetlelike around and around in a slow spiral. Dora, with some hesitation, granted the super-Renolf an extension of time—twelve hours out of a day instead of only eight. She also volunteered to help. At Renolf’s dictation, she took down a bulky mass of inarticulate notes, as he translated tirelessly from the cryptograms.
It was hard work, and no normal man could have gotten anything from it. The super-Renolf, however, one day summarized what the record told.
“The details are too obscure to repeat. In the main I have learned this: Io and Europa grew up together as abodes of intelligent life. For ages each lived its own life. Then telescopes made them aware of one another’s existence. Much later, when their science had grown to great heights, s
pace travel between them became possible.
“Europa, somewhat older in civilization, waged a terrific havoc on Io, nearly decimating its races. Satisfied, they returned and forgot their former enemy. Enmity had grown up between them for reasons I could not quite grasp. But Io builded anew, in secrecy.
“What was perhaps ages later, she arose in a mighty wrath and wreaked vengeance on Europa. But a terrible vengeance it was! A horrible chemical was dumped wholesale in the other satellite’s atmosphere—a chemical that in a few short years took most of the oxygen from her atmosphere!”
Renolf shuddered a bit in the telling. “That accounts, you see, for the strange lack of oxygen in Europa’s atmosphere. That the chemical had in it iron in some form or other is obvious, because as we saw, that poor doomed planet is at present dusted with red rust. That is the saga of life when these small bodies were young and propitious.
“The record goes on to tell of Io’s gradual freezing over, and their successful stand against oblivion. Notice—their successful stand. The record ends, saying that, through with the struggles of youth, their race was entrenched, agelessly, against destruction.”
Renolf ended in a low mutter: “Again that mystery of what happens to great civilizations. They were invincible against Nature, and now—they are gone!”
“Isn’t that record a clue?” spoke up Dora. “As Io destroyed Europa, perhaps Ganymede or Callisto destroyed Io!”
“You haven’t the time sense,” returned Renolf disparagingly. “Ganymede and Callisto, being much larger, cooled down much later. Civilization on them did not reach such a peak till long after the people of Io had become independent of Nature. And, not fearing such a formidable enemy, what could a struggling young civilization inspire in the way of threat? The record, by the way, mentions that the two larger satellites had been visited in space ships. The loans found only barbaric races, with no conception of life, on other worlds.