by Earl
“I suppose in a way, though,” mused Schaulk, “I will save the world. Yes, I guess you might think of it that way.”
Jolted out of his own introspection, the general discarded several attitudes in the next moment, and adopted the only reasonable one.
“I’ll bite, Schaulk. What’s the punch line?”
“I just told you,” Schaulk said mildly. “If I wore heavy horn-rimmed goggles now, I’d squint at you myopically and tell you to sit down and then whip out my amazing weapon or invention, or the spaceship I worked up during lunch hours and just finished this morning. But I have nothing startling to show you or tell you except that I guess I will save the world after all, in a manner of speaking.”
The general went through sudden anger at being made a fool of. He went through pitying suspicion, that Schaulk’s mind had cracked. He went through scathing scorn at the man’s obvious melodramatics coated by mild understatement. All that flashed through him.
And then the general did the one thing he had tried most to avoid, jumping up like an eager child, yelling, “Schaulk! You’re serious—dead serious! You have a way to save us.”
“No,” said Schaulk, more dryly than ever. “You’ve got it all wrong. You see, what I mean is . . . but here. Come along. I want to show you something.”
Silently, a bundle of volcanic tenseness, the general followed the tall, robust scientist through the corridors of the vast atomic plant and outside to another isolated building. Inside, men in ray-proof leaden-woven suits handled large masses of materials of all kinds, packing them away.
Schaulk pointed through the observation window. “The junkyard we call it. Apparatus that gets too ‘hot’ after constant use in the atomic labs. Clothing contaminated beyond the danger point. Dregs and sludges and waste-products from the radioactive crucibles. All junk that has to be gotten rid of. Or call it garbage. Radioactive garbage.”
The general nodded, impatiently. “Dangerous stuff, of course. You can’t just toss it aside carelessly, like ordinary junk or garbage. You have to bury it deep in the ground.”
“This has been one of the major problems of atomic science since it began in 1945.” Schaulk went on. “We bury it deep all right, embedded in concrete too. Also we first seal it up in metal drums. Presumably, that keeps any radioactive rays from leaking up to the surface of the ground.”
“Presumably?”
“We tested some burial places recently, out in the desert. Hot stuff buried as long as eight years ago. It’s still hot—and leaking up. Vegetation withered all around. Bleached bones of coyotes. It’ll stay hot too for—oh, 25,000 years, to be conservative. Radioactivity, once started, takes a long long time to die out. Actually, though it will diminish gradually through eons of time, it’s immortal, reaching to the end of eternity. As witness the stars, atomic furnaces themselves.”
“Damn eternity,” said the general. “We’re concerned with this here now piece of time. What about that leakage?”
“At my urging not so long ago,” Schaulk said unhurriedly, “we buried the stuff at sea. Sunk it miles deep to the ocean floor in weighted containers. But I now seriously doubt if even that is safe. Eventually those containers will rot away, exposing the ocean water to radioactive contamination. I’ve already warned Washington that our children or grandchildren may curse us for killing all the fish at sea.”
The general pondered that. “You can’t bury it, or sink it in the sea. Nothing else helps, such as mere burning or chemical treatment. Then what can you do with it? How can you get rid of that atomic garbage, safely? What’s left?”
“An interesting question,” Schaulk conceded. But he changed the subject as he led the general back to his office. “You of course have heard the strange news about the contents of the egg bombs from space, that they are filled with apparatus, junk, clothing, dregs of all kinds—all radioactive.”
“At last you get to the point,” exploded the general, his mind seizing it keenly. “So that’s it! The space enemy found a real use for his atomic garbage, simply loading it in the egg bombs and hurling them into space toward Earth. Of all the humiliating . . .” The general gagged. “Earth defeated, wiped out, by an amazing new weapon of the space enemy composed of garbage! We get licked by garbage, atomic junk. Did you have to tell me this? And is this your big denouement—?”
But again the general’s mind lanced ahead. He grabbed the scientist by the arm, ecstatically.
“Schaulk! Now I see. So genius hides behind that football player’s hulk of yours. That’s how you’ll save us, or show us the way—by hurling our garbage back at them! Fight fire with fire!” The general’s tongue could hardly keep up now. “We have no spaceships but we won’t need them. We’ve got unmanned rockets. In a few weeks—months—we’ll cook up rockets able to shoot free of Earth’s gravitation. We’ve got to now. It’s the way! Sure, we thought of unmanned rockets with atomic bomb warheads . . . only the experts said that was as ticklish a problem as spaceships. To keep atomic warheads from exploding on takeoff meant in itself years of research. But sending off this non-explosive atomic garbage is duck soup. Within a year we can start off our garbage barrage at them . . . haha! . . . yes, if that’s what they want, we’ll give it to them . . . The Garbage War! That’s funny, Schaulk. Funny and glorious and thank heaven, amen!”
It was queer, how the general could laugh in one breath and then end on that solemn word, with all his soul in it, and with unashamed tears making furrows down his cheeks. It was not till later that he even thought of wiping them away.
“The Garbage War,” repeated Schaulk, and there might have been a faint chuckle in his flat nasal voice. He shrugged. “Too bad. Pity, really. That would have been jolly, if it came to that. You can tell the joke at the Officer’s Club later, and milk it for ail it’s worth, but there won’t be any Garbage War, General.”
The general’s voice reverted to a top-sergeant’s roar, in his unbelieving dismay. “Dammit all, man! If you wore a military uniform I’d have you courtmartialed and shot at sunrise for this. Now you say we are not going to hurl our atomic garbage back at the enemy? We’re just going to sit back and let them fling it in our face—?”
“But they aren’t flinging their atomic garbage at us,” said Schaulk, neatly ripping apart the whole fabric previously built up in the general’s mind, leaving him hung up with an idiotic expression.
A dozen questions leaped in the general’s mind then, but got jammed at the exit, and all that came from his lips was a meaningless-garble.
“By the way,” said Schaulk, “we traced the original trajectory back to Saturn, we think, although that point may never be cleared up.”
So the enemy is up on Saturn, thought the general, how far away? . . . 800,000,000 miles or so? . . .
“Anyway,” Schaulk was saying. “I’m glad it happened in a way, since it will convince Washington that my new plan is the only feasible one. Namely, to shoot our atomic garbage in space rockets straight at the sun. That’s the one and only really safe place to get rid of it, in that giant incinerator, as it were.”
Schaulk was tuning the radio in his office now, and nodded in satisfaction as a choking announcer choked it out. “UE flash! No egg bomb has been reported dropping on Earth for the past three hours. Nowhere on Earth! What does it mean—?”
Schaulk snapped it off.
“He’ll find out in time, and the rest of the world. Simple enough, as you can easily see, general. Earth finally moved along far enough in its orbit to get out of range of all those millions of egg barrels of atomic garbage floating in space.”
“Barrels?” echoed the general.
“Did I leave something out?” returned Schaulk. “Oh yes, of course. If only those ancient dead Saturnians hadn’t been so careless, scattering their atomic garbage into the dumping ground of space. Criminal of them. They didn’t look ahead, or didn’t care perhaps—that their barrels would of course take up long-period orbits around the sun, like comets and swarm meteors, and k
eep intersecting the orbits of other planets, time after time. And that sooner or later, by cosmic mischance, some planet would get in the way. However, it’s a good lesson to us not to let our atomic sins visit the heads of non-terrestrial people in the far future . . . did I mention that test of the egg-barrel casings indicated they may have floated in space for some 15,000 years? So now you see the whole picture clearly, General.”
“I—I do?”
“Good. And you see now,” Schaulk finished, his dry voice driest of all, “why I couldn’t claim to be saving the world at all, except in a sort of left-handed way, by first adding up all the clues and realizing that—” An atomic bomb burst in the general’s mind, anticipating those final concussive words.
“—that there never was any space enemy making war on us in the first place.”
ON MARS WE TROD
Some people say Alexander Graham Bell wasn’t really the inventor of the telephone. Here is a story of the first man to reach Mars—and who, like Bell’s unknown rival, didn’t get the credit—until he came back from the dead!
MIRACULOUSLY, the victim was alive! Excited, Mark Allison gave him a stiff shot, followed by hot soup. At last the man stopped shivering and a pink glow drove away the deadly blue of his skin.
The crisis was over. Death withdrew.
“Hello,” said Allison, feeling foolish at the trite word, but somebody had to say something first. “Feel all right? Wonder if you knew you were floating in space, frozen? Sometimes it happens too quickly—they just black out. Was your ship wrecked? Blasted open by a meteor? You were thrown clear probably. No chance to put on a space suit. But luckily, you got space-frozen instead of dying. It happens often enough. And lucky, too, I spotted you here, on the Mars-Earth run. Who are you, friend?”
But the reporter only got a puzzled stare in return, from the revived man. Why didn’t he understand plain Sol? It was the universal language of the Solar System in 2273, formerly the English-American language of Earth.
But the man only shook his head, and gibbered back in queer accents that baffled Allison.
Allison squinted thoughtfully, then, at the torn clothing he wore. Now he noticed how odd they were. Not a special style of any planet, but a style that reached across another dimension—time!
“Those old-time movies of ancient days,” Allison breathed. “The people wore outfits like yours. Pilots anyway. You’re from the past, my friend. You’ve been space-frozen for maybe centuries! Great Orion!”
But then, there was no strict limit to how long a man might stay unharmed in the deep freeze of space. Once frozen properly, he was perhaps good forever, or at least a thousand years. He wouldn’t “spoil,” anymore than food would spoil in any deep freeze.
Listening intently, Allison began to understand the man speaking back. After all, it was just an archaic form of modern 23rd century Sol-English. And by slowing down his own staccato accent into a drawl, Allison made himself understood by the other. They spoke the same language really, and only had to bridge the gulf of several centuries of change between their two “dialects.” After that, it went smoothly.
“The year 2273?” said the survivor finally, getting that clear. “It’s that far in the future—my future, that is? I’m from 1970!”
Allison whistled. This broke all records. Some space frozen men had been found and revived as late as 87 years after their accident. But no recorded case was on file of a survivor of 303 years. He was really ancient!
The man looked sad now, as if looking back down the dim corridor of time to the lost age which he could never again see. He was suddenly forlorn, pathetic, a lost soul.
But Allison was too excited for pity, at the next thought he had.
“Let’s see—space travel didn’t begin until 1968. Then you must be among the early pioneers of space. Maybe your name is even famous in interplanetary history, as one of those renowned space trail blazers.”
The man looked startled. “You mean I might be part of history now? My name known and recorded?”
“Why not?” Allison nodded. “Frobisher—Hackinwell—Kobawska—Bergdorf—Wentworth. Are you any of those?”
The man from 1970 shook his head. “John Henry Gregg.”
Allison filed through his memory. It was all past history, those early pioneering days of space. Every kid learned it all by heart in school these days, about those famous, thrilling maiden flights to the Moon, Venus, Mars and all the other planets.
Allison frowned in disappointment, seeing a headline slipping from his grasp. “John Henry Gregg? Sorry, it’s not familiar.”
The other’s face fell too. But then he shrugged. “Naturally not, come to think of it. I failed in my flight. Never got back to Earth. History would only remember the successful space flyers. So I’m unknown.”
“That’s it of course,” Allison agreed. “There were dozens of poor devils like you who bravely set out to conquer space and set foot on a new world—and never made it. Martyrs. But of course all the glory goes to the guy who makes it.”
John Henry Gregg of 1970 nodded. But it was a nodding droop of fatigue. He almost slumped to the floor before Allison caught him and bundled him in the bunk.
For a moment Allison feared he might be passing into eternal sleep, unable to survive his 300-year ordeal in frozen space. But a grin came to his lips at an unmistakable sound.
“Snoring,” Allison muttered. “Poor guy is just dead tired. He’ll be all right after a long sleep.”
Allison plotted headlines before he dozed off himself. He would come back to Earth with something far better than the Flower Show on Mars.
In fact, something quite sensational. . . .
The next morning, Earth time, Gregg looked refreshed at breakfast, a vigorous young stalwart, obviously one of the finest physical specimens of the 20th century. But despite his powerful build and rugged face, he had strangely soft brown eyes that brooded, tabbing the sensitive mind behind. He could be the man of action—or the thinker too.
Allison looked him over with a preparatory twinkle in his eye.
“You don’t look a bit your age, friend—303 years.”
“Don’t feel a day over 200 myself,” Gregg quipped back. “Actually, I’m 30. Or I was, back in 1970.”
Allison resumed where they had left off. “So you tried for some planet and cracked up in space in 1970. Which planet?”
Gregg answered bleakly.
“Mars or bust. Do or die. I was going to be famous as the first man to step foot on Mars. A Columbus of Space—that sort of thing. Dozens of us in those exciting days were filled with the wild spirit of adventure. Ships had reached the Moon and returned, in 1968, opening up space. When Kobawska reached Venus a year later, the world went into a frenzy. Then everybody tried for Mars. That was the next big goal. Mars or bust—”
His voice went down “For me it was bust. I saw it coming at my ship, but too laic—the meteor. All went black until I woke up here in your ship. That parade down Fifth Avenue—the cheering millions—the big headlines with my name—all that was wiped out in one crashing moment.”
Allison pitied him. He had risked all for fame, even his life. His life had been miraculously restored to him, three centuries later, by a quirk of fate. But now what was he, here in 2273? Just one of those failures of space pioneering. Unknown and unsung.
How many daring mariners had sailed toward America, before Columbus—and never been heard of again?
“You wouldn’t know this,” Allison told him gently, “but it was James Wentworth who first reached Mars, in 1971, a year after you tried and cracked up. His name of course ranks today with the greats of history’s explorers and discoverers, both terrestrial and interplanetary. We have a Wentworth Day, like Columbus Day, on August 15, celebrating the day that a man first trod the red sands of Mars. Too bad you didn’t beat him to it, Gregg.”
“But I did,” Gregg returned quietly.
Mark Allison twisted a finger in his ear. “Funny, I thought I heard
you say you did beat him to Mars.”
“I did,” Gregg repeated.
“You’re confused, friend,” Allison said impatiently. “A while ago you told me you cracked up in space.”
“On the return trip from Mars,” nodded Gregg. “Not on the way there.”
Allison sat down. All his muscles had turned to rubber. He choked out words. “Now look, friend. I’ve got a heart murmur and not-so-steady nerves. Pm prone to nervous breakdowns.
Please—please don’t kid around with me. Now let’s start all over. Answer me slowly and carefully. You got in your spaceship, right? Just answer yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“You headed for Mars?”
“Yes.”
“You did not hit that meteor on the way to Mars?”
“No.”
Allison wetted his lips. “You hit said meteor on the return trip from Mars to Earth?”
“Yes.”
Allison looked like he was praying now. “Now—the jackpot question—did you just circle Mars without landing?”
“No.”
Allison could hardly spill the words out fast enough then. “You landed? You set your foot”—he stopped and pointed at Gregg’s right foot, dramatically—“that very foot down on Martian soil? The first human foot to ever do it?”
“No.”
Allison jerked as if stabbed. “But—but—?”
“It was my left foot,” Gregg returned seriously. “I remember it all so clearly—you know, etched on my memory . . .
Allison took up breathing again. “Good heavens, man,” he bleated. “Think of my nerves. All right, you set your left foot down on Mars first. And in 1970? One year before James Wentworth?”
“Yes.”
There was dead silence in die spacejet for a long moment, as the two men stared at each other. Gregg got uncomfortable under the fixed eyes of Allison, for they shone now with awe—infinite awe.