The Collected Stories

by Earl

  In his corner, old Greeley muttered away. “My grandfather said sunshine warmed you outside and moonshine warmed you inside. If I could have one or the other, I’d be satisfied. This way I’m cold, cold, cold both inside and out. No sunshine, just cold, cold, cold——”

  PHIL WACKER found breathing hard by the time he had left the air lock and stepped outside. He strode to the near-by drift of solidified air, scraped away the upper layers, which contained hydrogen and helium to excess, and scooped his heavily gloved hand into the virgin air snow. He stuffed several handfuls into the container on his chest and opened the valves carefully. The little battery that heated the interior of his suit also warmed the resistance coil over which the cold gases flowed on their way in. He took a deep breath of fresh air.

  After an exhaustive flexing of his legs and arms to see that the suit was quite fit to preserve life from the demons of cold and airlessness, Wacker began his journey.

  He swung along in the stiff air suit. Through his vision plate the ultra-frigid wastes greeted him mockingly. The ice god had usurped a world that had once been his and his peoples, and had driven them underground, with the worms.

  He passed one of his landmarks on the way to the underworld, a half-tumbled skeleton tower of steel, But the metal was not visible; it was coated over with a foot thickness of icy substance. This had once been a radio aerial, broadcasting to the great surface world that was no more. In the dim, starlighted distance he could see the ruins of the former smoky city of Pittsburgh, now embedded in a cocoon of white.

  Wacker continued into the white barrens. At times he had to skirt stupendous ice heaps whose spires refracted the starlight in spectrum sheen. It was an eerie; world, dark and haunted, brooding with death. Try as he might, Wacker could not picture the surface world free of ice and air snow, laved by a warmed atmosphere, brilliantly illumined by a blazing sun. It seemed a dream of the past that had never been true.

  Yet with atomic energy there could be such a world——

  An hour after he had left his wife there loomed out of the darkness a large, hemispherical structure from whose circle of windows gleamed man-made light. The sight quickened Wacker s pulse, drove away the chill depression that the lonely trek over the frozen wastes had lodged in his heart. As he came nearer he saw the electrically driven snow vehicle with its train of loaded cars delivering air snow to the tubes for underground use. He wandered into the dumping shed and watched the air-suited men open the bottom traps of the cars over the gratings which sifted the air snow down into a large hold. Here it began to liquefy and was pumped to the various ventilation units of the subterranean city.

  Wacker filed into the airlock with the men and stepped in their company into the warmed and lighted quarters that took up half the dome. Air suits were doffed with grins of pleasure.

  “Ah, warmth!” muttered one man, rubbing hands that were blue with cold. “What a blessing.”

  “I’ll be happy,” moaned another man with pinched lips, “if my next detail is tending the heat shafts. But I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again. There’s ice in my veins.”

  “I have three weeks more of this icy hell,” vouchsafed another bitterly.

  A bell clanged loudly. The men jumped up eagerly. “At least the food will be warm!” shouted a voice with almost a cheery note in it.

  They filed through a door toward the dining hall. From another door came the next shift of air-snow gleaners, for to them the bell had been the signal to leave. They donned their air suits in silence, with dispirited faces. It was a grim task ahead of them, and now and then one of the men did not come back. None knew when it might be his turn to stretch his frozen body out in the ruthless wastes.

  Wacker hung his air suit carefully in a wall locker. He rubbed his face to start a circulation that seemed to have stopped and made his way down a corridor toward the elevator that plied the. depths. He greeted the attendant before the grill-work cage.

  “Elevator due in two minutes,” informed the attendant. His voice was flat, toneless. Fifty years of life in the hardships of that existence had worn his spirit thin. His thoughts, when they weren’t bitter, were blank.

  “Has my shipment of coal arrived asked Wacker.

  “Two hundred pounds. We’ll pack it on a sled for you to take back with you on your return.”

  “Only two hundred pounds!” exclaimed the young scientist. “I ordered five hundred, as usual. Why have they cut it down?”

  The other shrugged. “You’ll have to see the commissioner of supplies about that.” He got up to swing open the cage doors as the elevator came up.

  A HALF DOZEN MEN stepped out and lent a hand to the unloading of the freight that had been brought up—supplies for the little community under the dome. These men were to stay for a month on the air-foraging detail. Wacker stepped into the elevator with a half dozen other men who had finished their month’s stretch loading air snow. They were obviously happy to leave the surface world, much like, in reverse order, the miners of previous times had been glad to go back to the surface world.

  Five hundred feet below, the elevator car stopped. The passengers filed, one by one, before an attendant, who checked each one off and sent him to his next detail. Those who had wives were allowed to make arrangements to have the same sleeping quarters.

  “Wacker?” said the checker. “Oh, yes. Your monthly visit. Supply department, as usual?”

  “I think I’ll have to see the commissioner of supplies himself, to order some special materials,” returned the young scientist.

  Ten minutes later, after putting through the necessary calls by telephone, the attendant handed Wacker a ticket. “Elevator 23 to the second level and monorail car, blue line, to the office.”

  Wacker took the punched pasteboard and boarded the proper elevator downward to the second level. Here a noisy, crawling monorail car carried him jerkily along the ceiling of the second level. Below stretched one part of the underworld city that housed the last of humanity. It was a circular cavern, a mile in diameter, on the floor of which had been built a continuous honeycombed structure. Every available inch had been used scientifically, up to within twenty feet of the flat ceiling. This open space was reserved for the monorail system and for circulation of air.

  There were nine other levels, similar in arrangement. It was like a gigantic beehive in all, and though the inhabitants were men, they labored with the business of the bee to keep this community in smooth-running order. There could be no shirkers, no useless drones, in this subterranean city—nor any privileged class. All were workers, and mere existence taxed their combined efforts.

  Two centuries before, when the realization of doom had crashed upon humanity, a group of scientists and engineers had conceived this refuge from the coming catastrophe. Support had been at first scanty, then overabundant, as the hoped-for revival of the sun failed to appear with the passing years. Other such projects had been started by other groups, but had not started soon enough, nor been planned carefully enough.

  When the first blight of a superarctic cold began to lay waste the upper world, only this underground habitation was fit to protect life. There had been the awful event of panic-stricken millions trying to squeeze into a space designed only for thousands. Military defenses, set up in forethought, had slaughtered those many who tried to storm the place, after the chosen few had entered. Not long after, the forces of nature carried on the massacre on a world-wide scale.

  Man had been wiped out, except for this little community in the bowels of earth. There had been many problems to solve. Before the air above had fallen to earth as an easily garnished snow, they had had to take in gaseous atmosphere, heating it. There had been a shortage of almost everything from the first.

  Food, however, had been stocked up for a ten-year period. The scientific members of the group, composing fully half their number, worked as never before to solve the food problem after the surplus was gone. A process was finally perfected for converting the life-form
lumbricus into a fairly palatable and nutritious gelatine, salted with cultures of algae that could be raised under the ultra-violet ray.

  The upper cold had driven the vast army of earthworms downward, into the very vats of the scientists. The unappreciated worm, fertilizing man’s fields for him before the sun went out, now supplied him with food.

  The survivors had then settled down grimly to the task of existing in the face of all odds. They had carried down with them as much of machinery, supplies, books and worthwhile things as possible, but there had been a strict and miserly limit to everything. They had enough, however, to start the wheels of civilization below ground.

  Mining operations had begun. The original planners, in their great wisdom, had selected a spot near coal, oil and iron deposits in western Pennsylvania. Questing tunnels went to each and made use of these precious materials. Like a mechanical-minded mole, man forged a Vulcan’s workshop in the depths.

  While merciless natural forces denuded a world above of life, these diligent humans created a new nether life. Everything was at a premium, and there was barely enough for all, but life went on below while death triumphed above.

  Wacker caught something of the grandeur of this brave stand against oblivion as he stood on the landing roof waiting for his appointment. Much had been written in previous times of the pettiness of man’s goals, the futility of civilization, the faults and silly prides of men. But this fight against the blind omnipotence of the all-powerful universe had brought one thing in sharp relief: mankind’s indomitable spirit. In itself and of itself, it was something sublime.

  THE commissioner of supplies, Fenwick, was one of a dozen men who controlled the destinies of the twenty thousand souls in the community. He had the same pinched look of malnutrition they all had, and the same dead-white skin. His brow carried deep wrinkles of worry and care. His eyes were bleak in their depths. The administrators sometimes knew too closely how starkly near to extinction they were, if certain misfortune should come at once.

  Greetings were short. “Well, Wacker, what is it?”

  “I’d like to have my quota of batteries increased.” began the young scientist with a deep breath. “I’m nearing an important part of my researches. You recall that my approach had been through neutron bombardment of argon-fluorine compounds. These are not only chemically unstable, but atomically as well. As I load these sensitive compounds with neutrons, they go through a series of transitions—transmutations, in fact—each radiating more energy than was originally put in—— But not enough more, as yet, to make it practicable. I hope to reach a transition substance that will release its atomic energy in generous amounts. In fact, in colossal amounts.”

  “And blow yourself to atoms, I suppose.” mused the commissioner.

  Wacker shrugged. “That’s why you have me on the surface, and three miles from the outlet. It’s dangerous stuff, but I think I can control it once I get it. I will need more battery power, and more——”

  “And what more?” snapped the official at Wacker’s pause.

  The young scientist reached in his pocket for a paper and extended the list. Fenwick’s lips pursed as he read the items. Then he looked up half angrily.

  “Outrageous. You’re asking too much. You know how limited our supplies are of everything. If I grant you all this stock, there’ll be shortage of material for the food labs. They’re doing something important down there—growing amoeboid colonies in earthworm cultures. They will revolutionize our food problem, for the new gelatine is more nutritious. Should I take supplies from them to give to you—you and your mythical atomic power?”

  Wacker, with an effort, ignored the implied sarcasm and said simply, “I need them.”

  The commissioner grinned mirthlessly and leaned back in his battered chair. “I suppose next you’ll want a complete new wardrobe, too. And you may as well ask for permission to have a child, for that’s how little chance you have of getting these things.” He tossed the list back.

  “Then I don’t get anything?” asked Wacker quietly.

  Fenwick stared at him strangely. “Do you realize that the best of earth’s scientists, before the sun went out, could not release the energy of the atom? They had splendid laboratories. It’s nobody’s fault, but your facilities are poor, and the rest is pure enthusiasm. You’ve worked ten years and doubtless could spend another thousand without reaching your goal. With your brilliant mind you would do far more good in the food labs.”

  Wacker said quietly, “Before the sun went out, scientists did not have the drive that is behind me. They did not have the goad of impending extinction to whip their minds to greater effort. What will we do when the earthworms die out, as they eventually must, and soon? You can’t grow your amoeboid cultures on metal ores. What will we do when our coal and oil supplies give out? Our life underground is coming to a focal point of starvation and lack of power. Another ten or twenty years and our birth rate will be cut to zero. After that, it will be all over for the human race.”

  The young scientist’s eyes blazed, his breath came short in emotion. “Some twisting of space snuffed the sun out like a candle, but that twist is gone. Atomic power could again bring life to the sun. With that same power in our hands, we will bring life to the upper world, for countless ages! We will become the men we should be, instead of worms, eating worms. We are near the secret, Greeley and I.”

  “GREELEY!” scoffed the commissioner. “His seventy-two-year-old brain is burned out—a husk of empty thoughts. He saw twenty men die by freezing in their air suits, himself rescued in the eleventh hour from the bitter wastes—enough to drive any man mad. For years after, the very word ‘cold’ would make little mad lights come into his eyes.”

  Wacker remembered those times he and Maida had seen the old man standing before the window, shaking his fist at the frozen flats, muttering imprecations. In a way, that was the drive behind him. “Before that he was the foremost atomic physicist,” defended Wacker. “He’s been a great help to me, or perhaps I to him, and together we’ve come close to our aim, to atomic power. Fenwick, you’ve got to believe me——”

  The commissioner sprang to his feet, began pacing the room. Suddenly, he turned with a haggard face. “Wacker, I wish I could believe you,” he said uncertainly. “If you were right——”

  His eyes blazed for a moment, then dulled. He shook his head wearily.

  “Yesterday there was a meeting of the council,” he continued tonelessly. “In the course of business, your license as a research scientist on atomic physics was revoked. You are transferred to the food labs.”

  The young scientist stood stunned. “But I’m the only one working on atomic physics,” he remonstrated wildly. “The only one in our entire community—on earth! If you take that away from me and destroy my laboratory, the last slender chance of discovering atomic power will be gone. The end will——”

  Fenwick nodded. “I know,” he murmured. “We talked the matter over for hours, decided at last that it was a chimera you were chasing. Ten years you’ve tried. You’ve used a tremendous amount of chemicals, apparatus, battery power. Pure research with no practical returns, was the verdict.”

  The commissioner saw the misery in the young scientist’s face. “It was a grand effort, my boy. You will be remembered for it. That is”—his thoughts turned gloomy—“if there is any one to remember.”

  In the stark realism of the moment, the bare exposure of hidden thoughts, the commissioner did not realize quite what he was saying, as he went on, with the misery of ages in his eyes. “Life will be gone soon, totally extinct. What is life? A chemical reaction, a spawn of heat. It does not exist in space, nor in space cold, which makes up most of the cosmos. Heat is a special condition of space. The stars are transitory phenomena. They are born of the nebular veil, enjoy a brief glory, then wane to the heatless state of space. Some few stars have planetary systems, and some few planets, specially graced,’ mix nature’s test tubes and begin a chemical reaction that carries
on for an age or so, until the heat which catalyzed it puffs away. Such is the dream of life.”

  Wacker was muttering brokenly to himself. “Greeley was right after all. His brain, half mad, half wise, realized the vicious circle of futility dur search for enlightenment is. What was it he said? The secret of atomic power, or of anything, lies just before our noses. It is there, within grasp, along with a billion other things—unwanted things, like a blue grain in a handful of yellow sand grains. But to find it calls for sublime luck. Man blunders along to great discoveries. His search is a blind groping. Now and then the wheels of the gods grind fortuitously and push something into his fingers.

  “Thus it is with our atomic energy. It lies up there in my laboratory, has been dangling before our faces for ten years. Greeley and I reached so many times—clasped only air, defeat. Given more time, we might clutch it to-morrow, or never in a thousand years. The law of chance, a cosmic gamble, rules our lives and all the universe. And it has not stopped for our number.”

  A BUZZ filled the room suddenly. Fenwick sat down at his desk to answer the phone. After a moment of listening, he hung up and looked at Wacker queerly. “There’s been a radio signal from your wife. Seems there’s been trouble——”

  “Quick!” yelled Wacker. “Where’s the nearest radiosonic unit?”

  “Level 4. I’ll go with you.”

  Together, they took an elevator downward, admitted immediately by the attendants upon recognition of the commissioner. On the way Wacker explained how his wife was able to communicate by wireless when the only known radio sets were sparingly used as sonic apparatus in their mining projects, and occasionally for communication in great emergency.

  “I did some exploring in the ruins of Pittsburgh near my lab on one occasion, and found a complete transmitting outfit frozen in a block of ice. I took block and all, on my sled, thawed it out, and set it to working. It’s simply a low-wave set in the ten-meter band. I told my wife how to hook it up with our battery current and signal in case of emergency. I just wonder now if Greeley——”