by Earl
But then the worst happened. The radar set blew out!
Jon sat still, stunned for a long minute, a slow icy chill creeping up his spine. His vision was completely blinded by the Dark Nebula smothering all light in space. And now, with his radar set useless, he was drifting through space aimlessly. Only radar could have guided him back to Earth. Now, if he tried it, he might crash into Earth, unable to see it with his eyes or with radar!
In fact, Jon didn’t even know in what direction Earth lay now. Nor Mars, nor Venus, nor the sun. Jon was lost in the inky blackness of the Dark Nebula.
Worse yet, without either his eyes or radar to depend on, Jon could not see the dangerous asteroids wandering through this region of space. Any stellar object might whiz up like a ghost and smash his ship to bits.
“And I won’t even see it!” Jon groaned. “There might be something rushing at me right now—but I can’t see a thing in that infernal blackness!”
The Dark Nebula was only an annoyance to the rest of the solar system. To Jon, it might be death!
Could he somehow reach a planet safely? Should he just rocket blindly in one direction and hope to blunder upon Mars or Earth or Venus? But suppose he did reach one of them. How would he know when he was close? He could probably land all right—but at a hundred miles a second!
Jon sat up. His radio! There was still some hope. Radio waves could still travel through space. The Dark Nebula didn’t stop that, only light waves. Jon could signal an SOS. Perhaps it would be picked up by some nearby spaceship. Then, by using their ship’s radar, rescuers could find him and tow him home safely.
Heaving a sigh of hopeful relief, Jon turned his radio on full power. “SOS! Lieutenant Jon Jarl calling! SOS! Am lost in space, without radar. SOS!”
Jon signaled frantically for minutes that seemed eternities. No answer came back from the pit of darkness around him. Then he remembered that, every other ship had been ordered grounded for the duration of the emergency. Jon had the horrible feeling that he was all alone in a black, empty, lifeless universe.
The clock lied. It said only three minutes had passed. But Jon knew it was an eternity later when a voice finally came back.
“Hello! Calling Lieutenant Jon Jarl! I picked up your SOS! I am turning about and heading your way!”
Jon barely kept himself from yelling like a madman in joy and relief. Calming himself, he asked, “Which ship are you? What’s your name?”
There was a silence and then the voice that came back had a strange gloating note to it—“My name is . . . Jet Jaeger!”
Jon froze, gasping in astonishment. Jet Jaeger, the very bandit he had been chasing, had turned back to rescue him? Did that murderous criminal have a spark of human kindness in him after all? He had robbed and murdered all over the nine planets. Was he now going to perform the only decent act of his life?
Jon grinned. “What do you know? I get rescued by Public Enemy Number One of the solar system! That’s one for the books!”
Not long after, Jet Jaeger’s radio voice came in again. “Ahoy, Space Copper! I tracked you by radar, of course. I’m near your ship now.”
“Look, Jet Jaeger,” Jon said. “I’ll see that you get the full mercy of the courts for rescuing me—”
A harsh laugh interrupted. “Rescuing you? How stupid can you be, Copper? Don’t you realize that the only reason I turned back is because you are now at my mercy?”
Again a cold chill crept up Jon’s spine. The bandit continued, gloating. “You can’t see me at all, Copper. Therefore you can’t aim your guns at me. You could shoot all day at me without hitting me. But I can see you! Get it?”
“You mean . . . you’re going to shoot me down in cold blood?” Jon returned in a hopeless voice. His fingers flew over the controls. If he could only pinpoint that voice on the radio—
“No!” came back gratingly. “Honest, you cops got no imagination at all. Don’t you see what fun I can have with you? I’m going to give you a chance to escape, see? Open up your rockets full speed. Maybe you can still outrun me. If you don’t, I’ll fire on you right now, like a sitting duck! I’ll give you ten seconds to make your choice! One . . . two . . .”
Jon groaned. What a fiendish game the space bandit had devised. Jon had no real choice at all. If he didn’t run, Jet Jaeger would blast him down on the spot. But if Jon did rocket away at high speed, he risked crashing an asteroid, without radar to warn him. And he knew even if he escaped that fate, the bandit could still easily pursue him with his radar, and eventually shoot Jon down. It was the game of cat and mouse. And Jon was not the cat.
“All right,” Jon snapped. “I’m ready, Jaeger. I’m going to make a run for it. Here goes . . .”
Jon turned on his rockets, swung his ship, and rammed it into high speed. He stared ahead, but could see nothing in the inky blackness of the Dark Nebula.
But a screech came from the radio of the space criminal. “You idiot! Look out! You’re aiming directly at me!”
“I know it!” said Jon. The next moment there was a grinding crash. The sharp steel nose of Jon’s ship plowed into the aft section of the bandit ship and ripped it open.
Jon dived into his spacesuit and leaped over into the wreck, which still clung to the nose of his ship. Jet Jaeger lay gasping for air on the floor. Jon crammed him into a spacesuit before he died of asphyxiation.
Then Jon held him at gunpoint.
“How did you do it?” croaked the bandit. “You couldn’t see my ship. You had no radar. How could you aim straight at me?”
“How stupid can you space crooks be?” Jon grinned. “You forget that radio signals can be tracked down. All the while that you were talking and gloating, I was tuning my radio triangulator, which showed me exactly from which direction your radio waves came. I aimed my ship that way. I was taking the chance of smashing up my own ship, but Space Patrol craft are tougher than most commercial ships . . . like yours.”
As Jon tied up the cursing bandit, he added, “By the way, your radar set is all I need to find my way back to headquarters, with you as prisoner. You rescued me after all, old pal. The Dark Nebula will be gone tomorrow. When it clears away, you’ll see the stars and planets again—through bars!”
1953
THE TIME CYLINDER
At the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, a time capsule, containing representative samples of our cultural and technological achievement, was buried. So carefully thought out were the enclosures that even a copy of a science-fid ion magazine was placed in the capsule! Our descendants may some day examine the contents of this capsule with interest and astonishment. Hut suppose we were to find a lime capsule. What might it contain? What civilisation could have buried it? Eando Binder, popular author of past years, returns to science-fid ion to explore this fascinating theme.
“AND you uncovered the time capsule with your plow?” asked Stoddard.
The farmer nodded. He shifted his chew of tobacco in his cheeks, astounded at all the furor this discovery had caused. “Out in my east forty I found it,” he said. “Just cleared that piece. It was timber and scrub laud before. My plow bit something hard just under the ground. Figured it was a rock so I scooped away dirt and there it was—or the top of it—that thing. What did you call it?”
“A time capsule,” Stoddard said, trying to control his feverish excitement, “Look at it. What else could it be? A long-lasting, bronze like cylinder twenty-five feet long, completely sealed. Very much like the others we’ve buried at limes for future ages to find. The Archeological Institute sent Jackson and me to investigate your report of it. We thought of course—no offense—it might he simply a wild story.”
Jackson also was bristling with excitement. “What a find! Look bow it’s tarnished and encrusted with mold. A record-crypt from some long past age!”
It lay there, a riddle wrapped in tawny metal. The farmer himself had hitched up his tractor and dragged it free of the ground. What strange, unknown, past civilization had buried ibis
record of itself, fated to be found in 1953?
“The papers will go crazy when the news gets out,” Stoddard prophesied. “This is headline stuff.” He whirled to the phone. “Time’s wasting. I’ll tell Professor Beatty at the Institute to send a truck to haul it there. Then for lire grand opening. How far hack does this dale, Jackson? A thousand years? Ten thousand? Who knows?”
But already Jackson was staring at the time capsule with puzzled eyes, vaguely sensing that the answer promised to he more astounding than they yet dreamed . . .
Sirens wailed through the city streets, a few hours later. An eager crowd already lined the path of the big trailer truck as it hauled the huge cylinder. Flanked by its police escort of motorcycles, to the Archeological Institute.
Extras already proclaimed it in their headlines as—TIME CAPSULE FOUND FROM DAWN OF CIVILIZATION. Radio announcers were hardly less reticent nor more accurate with “Ancient record-crypt may be a million years old.” Camera crews from TV networks were at hand, recording everything on film as the giant capsule was carefully maneuvered into the back warehouse of the Institute. Nothing could so fire the imagination of the public as finding something from antiquity, throwing light on Earth’s past history.
It was like the discovery of King Tut’s tomb all over again, only on a grander scale. Finally the police succeeded in waving the last of the crowd away and the warehouse doors closed on the time capsule.
Professor Beatty, director of the Institute, stared at it with shocked wonder, as if somehow it had no right to exist. “We’ll drop everything,” he announced immediately. “Even that sorting of Mayan pottery. We’ll get at this tomorrow with our whole crew.” Stoddard’s face fell. “Must it wait till tomorrow? Professor, how about me and Jackson? Can’t we get right to work on it? Why waste a whole day?”
Beatty had to chuckle. “That, thing has been buried for untold centuries perhaps. Millions of days. What would one more day matter? All right, go ahead, you two eager-beavers. But you’re getting the dirty work, scraping off that mold.”
He left, smiling at their youthful enthusiasm. He, too, had been that way, long ago, when he came across his first find of Neolithic arrowheads.
Left alone, Stoddard and Jackson went to work with panting haste. Surprisingly, it was an easy job to chip off the hardened mold and clean the surface. Often it took days or weeks to extract ancient relics patiently from fossilized mud. This bronze cylinder began to gleam bright and clean under the final hand polishing, in less than six hours.
“Funny,” Jackson muttered. “You’d think something buried for any really long period of time would be far more corroded than this. What if this thing is a hoax?”
Stoddard yelped at the word, as if it bad stabbed him. “Don’t say such a thing, Jackson.”
But Jackson was persistent with that gnawing doubt. “I’d swear it looks as if it had rested in the ground only a short time. Somebody might have buried it just a few years ago as a practical joke. People have done such things, you know—remember tile Cardiff Giant?”
Stoddard had recovered his excitement. “Always the skeptic.” be chided. “Listen, what if the makers of the cylinder knew great metal arts? What if they made an alloy resistant to the ravages of time? See?—that would explain it.”
“Sure, sure, Jackson agreed with a twisted lip. “That’s nice and glib. For a so-called scientist, Stoddard. you have a most naive attitude.”
“May I return the compliment?” said Stoddard, dripping honey from his voice. “You’re of the hard-headed school, Jackson. Just a shade short of the lard-headed school.”
Thus they worked on as a team, smoothly, oiled by mutual stubs of sarcasm flying back and forth. The casual listener might infer they were bitter personal enemies. But the sensitive observer would see their staunch friendship. Their slinging insults were really words of respect and admiration, merely couched in reverse semantics. If they ever said anything nice about each other, it would lie the danger signal that their friendship was precarious.
“There’s something peculiar about this whole thing.” Jackson said seriously. “What past age could turn out a tooled cylinder like this? Certainly not the Egyptians with their clumsy stone pyramids. Nor the Sumerians with their crude clay pottery. And not any later age like the Greeks and Homans, who were great thinkers hut poor doers. That metal container is as good as any we could make with modern technology. What blasted past era could duplicate it?”
“Isn’t that what we’re trying to find out?” Stoddard’s tone was ironic—but also puzzled. “Yes, what unknown artisans did whip that tiling together? How about it, Jackson—shall we open it up now?”
“Professor Beatty didn’t give us permission to go that far,” Jackson said hesitantly.
“He’d probably he sore if we did.” agreed Stoddard. “And how he can rip you up and down when he’s in a rage. We’d be hauled on the carpel and tongue-lashed. We’d be utter fools to open it.”
“O.K.,” said Jackson. “Let’s open it.”
They grinned at each other like two conspirators. “Hmm. If we ran,” amended Stoddard, feeling his way along the smooth cylinder. “Hair do we open it? The thing has no screw top, like the lime capsule buried at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It has no doors or openings of any kind. Solid, smooth, from end to end! Are we supposed to blast it open with dynamite? Or use an oxy-acetylene torch?”
Jackson went over it inch by inch, but it was getting dark now. “I’ll turn on the lights and we’ll give it a more thorough going-over. It must have some kind of opening, or means of getting inside.”
But Jackson’s linger paused at the light switch, at a sharp word front Stoddard. “Wait, Jackson—give a look. I don’t think we need lights. It glows in the dark!”
Eerily, it was so.
As the gloom within the warehouse deepened with the fading light of day, the time capsule began to glow. Brighter and brighter it shone, until it was gleaming all over with a soft rosy light, revealing its every contour perfectly, by itself.
“Weird!” breathed Stoddard, caught by the wonder of it. “Somehow they incorporated its own lightgiving mechanism within I be capsule. Maybe to make sure it would be found some day, or for that matter, some night. It would send out light if the least portion of it were uncovered from the ground. But figure out how it lights up like that, Jackson—all over, uniformly. Radioactive principle?”
Jackson was already there with the Geiger counter, a standard item with archeologists who use radioactivity as a yardstick to measure eons of time. “Not a peep from the counter. No radioactivity.” Stoddard was more baffled.
“No sign of luminous paint, or phosphorescent coating. Maybe, Jackson—just maybe—that metal is somehow excited by cosmic rays! They stream down on earth all the time, as they did a billion years ago. and as they will a billion years from now. It won Id he the one sure way of making the time capsule self-luminous for all ages to come, to the end of time.”
“Cosmic ray luminosity,” echoed Jackson scornfully. “That is in the category of scientific wizardry. How do you think up sum fairy tales. Stoddard? It may have happened by sheer accident, as well. Rotting stumps become luminous too. Or peat, buried in the ground. If you ask me, this may be a big hoax. It doesn’t add up right, somehow.”
“You’re suspicious,” Stoddard muttered, “even when two and two make four, right in front of your eyes. If we could only open it. we’d find the answer. But I’ve gone over it twice. It’s still like the unbroken shell of an egg—”
He stopped. They froze.
A sound came from tile enigmatic cylinder. A soft slithering sound. As they stared in paralyzed fascination, they saw tile unbelievable. Three holes popped open by themselves, in the side of the capsule, and three rods of metal extended themselves silently. Invitingly.
Stoddard stuttered: “The solid metal softened and opened by itself, letting out levers.”
“Levers?”
Stoddard pointed. “What else? Look,
numerals on the knobs of each. The first is marked with a simple Roman numeral I. The second II. The third III. So we use the levers in that order. A half-witted ape could figure that out.”
“Glad you did.” Jackson grinned. “All right, go to it.”
Stoddard moved the first handle, holding his breath. A low hum rose within the capsule. He waited. then moved number II. The hum changed to a whirr of oiled parts intermeshing. Number III resulted in a soft swish . . .
The door of the time capsule opened before them.
It was a large, round flap that miraculously detached itself from the seemingly solid metal and swung wide. From the inside came a rush of musty dry air or gas, as if the interior had been under pressure.
“Helium, no doubt,” Jackson said. “An inert gas, preserving things tunelessly, without harm. We sealed many of our relies in helium gas, in our own time capsules.”
Stoddard peered in. The interior too was lighted brightly and automatically. It was crammed with preserved items.
“Still a hoax, Jackson?” Stoddard needled. “A hunch of clever junk whipped up by some practical joker?”
“Why not?” replied Jackson. “That’s more logical than expecting them to be relies of a great and unknown civilization of Antarctica or wherever. Nevertheless, one of us may get a big shock.”
Stoddard’s eyes were glowing.
“Jackson,” be said eagerly, “What an opportunity for us. Aon and I are the two youngest members of the Institute. Mere apprentices, so to speak. Beginners. Neophytes. But what if we pinned down the origin of this amazing mystery tonight? Before Beatty and Henderson and Povkin and the other big guns take over? What a deal for us! But that would mean working through the night, unpacking the capsule. Are you game, Jackson?”
“That,” said Jackson, “is perhaps the most silly question asked since the beginning of the cosmos. Who could sleep anyway, thinking about such an exciting riddle? I’m with you. I can just picture their faces tomorrow when we tell them exactly where the time cylinder came from. That is, if luck is with us. Let’s get cracking.”