The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  It was a nasty job and Carson did it very well, because he loved it.

  While he still debated Lon’s insane boasts to Cathy over the beamphone system, he prepared to take over the farm of another colonist. That man had been deeper in debt than Lon, and he’d been less skilled at repairs, so it was time to gather him in. Carson called him to Cetopolis to tell him that the Company regretfully could not extend further credit, would have to take back his farm, house, and remaining food stores, and finish the cultivation of his thanar leaf crop to repay itself for the trouble.

  The colonist, however, said briefly: “Go to hell.”

  * * * *

  He started to leave Carson’s air-cooled office. Carson said mildly:

  “You’re broke. You’ll want a job when you haven’t got a farm. You can’t afford to tell me to go to hell.”

  “You can’t take my farm unless my fields are neglected,” the colonist said comfortably. “They aren’t. And my thanar leaf crop is going to be a bumper one. I’ll pay off all I owe—and we colonists are planning to start a trading company of our own, to bring in good machinery and deal fairly.”

  Carson smiled coldly.

  “You forget something,” he said. “As representative of the Trading Company, I can call on you to pay up all your debts at once, if I have reason to think you intend to try to evade payment. I do think so. I call on you for immediate payment in full. Pay up, please!”

  This was an especially neat paragraph in the fine print of the colonists’ contract with the Company. Any time a colonist got obstinate he could be required to pay all he owed, on the dot. And if he had enough to pay, he wouldn’t owe. So the Trading Company could ruin anybody.

  But this colonist merely grinned.

  “By law,” he observed, “you have to accept thanar leaves as legal tender, at five credits a kilo. Send out a truck for your payment. I’ve got six tons in my barn, all ready to turn in.”

  He made a most indecorous gesture and walked out. A moment later, he put his head back in.

  “I forgot,” he commented politely. “You said I couldn’t afford to tell you to go to hell. With six tons of thanar leaves on hand, I’m telling you to—”

  He added several other things, compared to which telling Carson to go to hell was the height of courtesy. He went away.

  Carson went a little pale. It occurred to him that this colonist was a close neighbor of Lon Simpson. Maybe Lon had gotten tired of converting dhil weed and shiver leaves into green peas and asparagus, and had gotten to work turning out thanar.

  * * * *

  Carson went to Lon’s farm. It was a very bad road, and any four-wheeled vehicle would have shaken itself to pieces on the way. The gyrocar merely jolted Carson severely. The jolting kept him from noticing how hot the weather was. It was really extraordinarily hot, and Carson suffered more because he spent most of his time in an air-conditioned office. But for the same reason he did not suspect anything abnormal.

  When he reached Lon’s farm, he noticed that the thanar leaves were growing admirably. For a moment, sweating as he was, he was reminded of tobacco plants growing on Maryland hillsides. The heat and the bluish-green color of the plants seemed very familiar. But then a cateagle ran hastily up a tree, out on a branch, and launched its crimson furry self into midair. That broke the spell of supposedly familiar things.

  Carson turned his gyrocar in at Lon Simpson’s house. There were half a dozen other colonists around. Two of them drove up with farm trucks loaded with mixed foliage. They had pulled up, cut off and dragged down just about anything that grew, and loaded their truck with it. Two other colonists were loading another cart with thanar leaves, neatly bundled and ready for the warehouse.

  They regarded Carson with pleased eyes. Carson spoke severely to Cathy.

  “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on duty at the beamphone exchange! You can be discharged—”

  Lon Simpson said negligently, “I’m paying her passage. By law, anybody can pay the passage of any woman if she intends to marry him, and then her contract with the company is ended. They had rules like that in ancient days—only they used to pay in tobacco instead of thanar leaves.”

  Carson gulped. “But how will you pay her fare?” He asked sternly. “You’re in debt to the Company yourself.”

  Lon Simpson jerked his thumb toward his barn. Carson turned and looked. It was a nice-looking barn. The aluminum siding set it off against a backing of shiver trees, dhil and giant sketit growth. Carson’s eyes bugged out. Lon’s barn was packed so tightly with thanar leaves that they bulged out the doors.

  “I need to turn some of that stuff in, anyhow,” said Lon pleasantly. “I haven’t got storage space for it. By law you have to buy it at five credits a kilo. I wish you’d send out and get some. I’d like to build up some credit. Think I’ll take a trip back to Earth.”

  At this moment, there was a very peculiar wave of heat. It was not violent, but the temperature went up about four degrees—suddenly, as if somebody had turned on a room heater.

  But still nobody looked up at the sun.

  * * * *

  Rattled, Carson demanded furiously if Lon had converted other local foliage into thanar leaves, as he’d made his green peas and the other stuff he’d told Cathy about on the beamphone. Lon tensed, and observed to the other colonists that evidently all beamphones played into recorders. The atmosphere became unfriendly. Carson got more rattled still. He began to wave his arms and sputter.

  Lon Simpson treated him gently. He took him into the house to watch the converter at work. One of the colonists kept its large coil suitably stuffed with assorted foliage. There was a “hand” of cured, early—best quality—thanar leaves in an erratically cut tin can. Duplicates of that hand of best quality thanar were appearing in the small coil as fast as they were removed, and fresh foliage was being heaped into the large coil.

  “We expect,” said Lon happily, “to have a bumper crop of the best grade of thanar this year. It looks like every colonist on the planet will be able to pay off his debt to the Company and have credit left over. We’ll be sending a committee back to Earth to collect our credits there and organize an independent cooperative trading company that will bring out decent machinery and be a competitive buying agency for thanar. I’m sure the Company will be glad to see us all so prosperous.”

  It was stifling hot by now, but nobody noticed. The colonists were much too interested in seeing Carson go visibly to pieces before them. He was one of those people who seem to have been developed by an all-wise Providence expressly to be underlings for certain types of large corporations. Their single purpose in life is to impress their superiors in the corporation that hires them. But now Carson saw his usefulness ended. Through his failure, in some fashion, the Company’s monopoly on thanar leaves and its beautiful system of recruiting labor were ruined. He would be discharged and probably blacklisted.

  If he had looked up toward the western sky, squinted a little, and gazed directly at the local sun, he would have seen that his private troubles were of no importance at all. But he didn’t. He went staggering to his gyrocar and headed back for Cetopolis.

  It was a tiny town, with plank streets, a beamphone exchange, and its warehouses over by the spaceport. It was merely a crude and rather ugly little settlement on a newly colonized planet. But it had been the center of an admirable system by which the Cetis Gamma Trading Company got magnificently rich and dispensed thanar leaf (a milligram a day kept old age away) throughout all humanity at the very top price the traffic would bear. And the system was shaky now and Carson would be blamed for it.

  Behind him, the colonists rejoiced as hugely as Carson suffered. But none of them got the proper perspective, because none of them looked at the sun.

  About four o’clock in the afternoon, it got suddenly hotter again, as abruptly as before. It stayed hotter. Something
made Cathy look up. There was a thin cloud overhead, just the right thickness to act something like a piece of smoked glass. She could look directly at the sun through it, examine the disk with her naked eye.

  But it wasn’t a disk any longer. Cetis Gamma was a bulging, irregularly shaped thing twice its normal size. As she looked, it grew larger still.

  * * * *

  Out on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus was absorbed in his contemplation of Cetis Gamma. With nothing to interfere with his scanning, he could follow the developments perfectly. There had been first one gigantic prominence, then two, which separated to opposite sides of its equator. Then two other prominences began to grow between them.

  For two full days, the new prominences grew, and then split, so that the sun came to have the appearance of a ball of fire surrounded by a ring of blue-white incandescence.

  Then came instability. Flame geysers spouting hundreds of thousands of miles into emptiness ceased to keep their formation. They turned north and south from the equatorial line. The outline of the sun became irregular. It ceased to be round in profile, and even the appearance of a ring around it vanished. It looked—though this would never have occurred to Rhadampsicus—very much like a fiercely glowing gigantic potato. Its evolution of heat went up incredibly. It much more than doubled its rate of radiation.

  Rhadampsicus watched each detail of the flare-up with fascinated attention. Nodalictha dutifully watched with him. But she could not maintain her interest in so purely scientific a phenomenon.

  When a thin streamer of pure blue-white jetted upward from the sun’s pole, attaining a speed of six hundred and ninety-two miles per second, Rhadampsicus turned to her with enthusiasm.

  “Exactly in the pattern of a flare-up according to Dhokis’ theory!” he exclaimed. “I have always thought he was more nearly right than the modernists. Radiation pressure can build up in a closed system such as the interior of a sun. It can equal the gravitational constant. And obviously it would break loose at the pole.”

  Then he saw that Nodalictha’s manner was one of distress. He was instantly concerned.

  “What’s the matter, darling?” he asked anxiously. “I didn’t mean to neglect you, my precious one!”

  Nodalictha did something that would have scared a human being out of a year’s growth, but was actually the equivalent of an unhappy, stifled sob.

  “I am a beast!” said Rhadampsicus penitently. “I’ve kept you here, in boredom, while I enjoyed myself watching this sun do tricks. I’m truly sorry, Nodalictha. We will go on at once. I shouldn’t have asked you to—”

  But Nodalictha said unhappily, “It isn’t you, Rhadampsicus. It’s me! While you’ve been watching the star, I’ve amused myself watching those quaint little creatures on the second planet. I’ve thought of them as—well, as pets. I’ve grown fond of them. It was absurd of me—”

  “Oh, but it is wonderful of you,” said Rhadampsicus tenderly. “I love you all the more for it, my darling. But why are you unhappy about them? I made sure they had food and energy.”

  “They’re going to be burned up!” wailed Nodalictha, “and they’re so cute!”

  Rhadampsicus blinked his eyes—all sixteen of them. Then he said self-accusingly, “My dear, I should have thought of that. Of course this is only a flare-up, darling.…” Then he made an impatient gesture. “I see! You would rather think of them as happy, in their little way, than as burned to tiny crisps.”

  He considered, scanning the second planet with the normal anxiety of a bridegroom to do anything that would remove a cloud from his bride’s lovely sixteen eyes.

  * * * *

  Night fell on Cetopolis, and with it came some slight alleviation of the dreadfulness that had begun that afternoon. The air was furnacelike in heat and dryness. There was the smell of smoke everywhere. The stars were faint and red and ominous, seen through the smoke that overlay everything. So far, to be sure, breathing was possible. It was even possible to be comfortable in an air-conditioned room. But this was only the beginning.

  Lon and Cathy sat together on the porch of his house, after sundown. The other colonists had gone away to their own homes. When the crack of doom has visibly begun, men do queer things. In Cetopolis some undoubtedly got drunk, or tried to. But there were farmers who would spend this last night looking at their drooping crops, trying to persuade themselves that if Cetis Gamma only went back to normal before sunrise, the crops might yet be saved. But none of them expected it.

  Off to the south there was an angry reddish glare in the sky. That was vegetation on the desert there, burning. It grew thick as jungle in the rainy season, and dried out to pure dessication in dry weather. It had caught fire of itself from the sun’s glare in late afternoon. Great clouds of acrid smoke rose from it to the stars.

  Beyond the horizon to the west there was destruction.

  Lon and Cathy sat close together. She hadn’t even asked to be taken back to Cetopolis, as convention would have required. The sun was growing hotter still while it sank below the horizon. It was expanding in fits and starts as new writhing spouts of stuff from its interior burst the bonds of gravity. Blazing magma flung upward in an unthinkable eruption. The sun had been three times normal size when it set.

  Lon was no astronomer, but plainly the end of life on the inner planets of Cetis Gamma was at hand.

  Cetis Gamma might, he considered, be in the process of becoming a nova. Certainly beyond the horizon there was even more terrible heat than had struck the human colony before sundown. Even if the sun did not explode, even if it was only as fiercely blazing as at its setting, they would die within hours after sunrise. If it increased in brightness, by daybreak its first rays would be death itself. When dawn came, the very first direct beams would set the shiver trees alight on the hilltops, and as it rose the fires would go down into the valleys. This house would smoke and writhe and melt; the air would become flame, and the planet’s surface would glow red-hot as it turned into the sunshine.

  * * * *

  “It’s going to be—all right, Lon,” Cathy said unconvincedly. “It’s just something happening that’ll be over in a little while. But—in case it isn’t—we might as well be together. Don’t you think so?”

  Lon put his arm comfortingly around her. He felt a very strong impulse to lie. He could pretend to vast wisdom and tell her the sun’s behavior was this or that, and never lasted more than a few hours, but she’d know he lied. They could spend their last hours trying to deceive each other out of pure affection. But they’d know it was deceit.

  “D-don’t you think so?” insisted Cathy faintly.

  He said gently, “No, Cathy, and neither do you. This is the finish. It would’ve been a lot nicer to go on living, the two of us. We’d have had long, long years to be together. We’d have had kids, and they’d have grown up, and we’d have had—a lot of things. But now I’m afraid we won’t.”

  He tried to smile at her, but it hurt. He thought passionately that he would gladly submit himself to be burned in the slowest and most excruciating manner if only she could be saved from it. But he couldn’t do anything.

  Cathy gulped. “I-I’m afraid so, too, Lon,” she said in a small voice. “But it’s nice we met each other, anyhow. Now we know we love each other. I don’t like the idea of dying, but I’m glad we knew we loved each other before it happened.”

  Lon’s hands clenched fiercely. Then the rage went away. He said almost humorously, “Carson—he’s back in Cetopolis. I wonder how he feels. He has no better chance than anybody else. Maybe he’s sent off spacegrams, but no ship could possibly get here in time.”

  Cathy shivered a little. “Let’s not think about him. Just about us. We haven’t much time.”

  And just then, very strangely, an idea came to Lon Simpson. He tensed.

  After a moment, he said in a very queer voice, “This isn’t a nova. It’s a flare-up. Th
e sun isn’t exploding. It’s just too hot, too big for the temperature inside it, and it’s a closed system. So radiation pressure has been building up. Now it’s got to be released. So it will spout geysers of its own substance. They’ll go out over hundreds of thousands of miles. But in a couple of weeks it will be back—nearly—to normal.”

  He suddenly knew that. He knew why it was so. He could have explained it completely and precisely. But he didn’t know how he knew. The items that added together were themselves so self evident that he didn’t even wonder how he knew them. They had to be so!

  * * * *

  Cathy said muffledly, her face against his shoulder, “But we won’t be alive in a couple of weeks, Lon. We can’t live long past daybreak.”

  He did not answer. There were more ideas coming into his mind. He didn’t know where they came from. But again they were such self evident, unquestionable facts that he did not wonder about them. He simply paid tense, desperately concentrated attention as they formed themselves.

  “We—may live,” he said shakily. “There’s an ionosphere up at the top of the atmosphere here, just like there is on Earth. It’s made by the sunlight ionizing the thin air. The—stronger sunlight will multiply the ionization. There’ll be an—actually conducting layer of air.… Yes.… The air will become a conductor, up there.” He wet his lips. “If I make a—gadget to—short-circuit that conducting layer to the ground here.… When radiation photons penetrate a transparent conductor—but there aren’t any transparent conductors—the photons will—follow the three-finger rule.…

  “They’ll move at right angles to their former course—”

  He swallowed. Then he got up very quietly. He put her aside. He went to his tool shed. He climbed to the roof of the barn now filled with thanar leaves. He swung his axe.

  The barn was roofed with aluminum over malleable plastic. The useful property of malleable plastic is that it does not yield to steady pressure, but does yield to shock. It will stay in shape indefinitely under a load, but one can tap it easily into any form one desires.