Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Both of the younger Maynards knew the story perfectly. Frank Forster had piloted the rocket around the Moon; but on his return, the landing 'chute of the craft had failed to work. He had crashed to his death.

  But the notes and photographs he had taken had survived the accident. Amy had gone through them, had found something—something that had given her hope that the hell scum might be conquered. So, though she was going to have a child, she set out in another, better space ship, equipped with a smaller rocket, which would provide for return after an actual landing on the Moon. She had had to go, because there was no one else who knew enough about ether flying.

  “If Amy’s coming back now, that’ll mean that maybe there’s a chance for us poor devils to survive,” said Roland.

  Ellayne shrugged. ‘Let’s talk about something less harrowing with suspense,” she suggested. “Tell me about dad’s creation theory. I’ve had so much to do. I’ve scarcely had a moment to listen to a clear presentation of it.”

  “Well,” Roland replied, “I’ll give it to you in brief first, and discuss its aspects afterward. Life had to begin somewhere, you’ll admit, even if that beginning was on a planet of another star. But dad thinks there was a separate beginning for each solar system. He says that during a certain brief period of their history almost all stars throw off a certain combination of corpuscular and etheric radiations, which acts to create simple life on the planets of those stars.

  "All right. That’s dad’s idea. The physicist, Benson, made careful tests of the Sun’s radiations when it was giving off green light. Nobody paid his work much attention then, and probably he didn’t think it particularly important himself. But, mixed with the green light—which was just plain green light—he found emanations somewhat like the corpuscular alpha and beta rays of radium, and other radiations belonging to the realm of etheric vibration, like light and cosmic rays, but of shorter wave length than either.

  “Coming, as these emanations did, just before the beginning of our troubles, it was natural to suspect a connection. Just how close that connection seems to be was not apparent, however, until dad tested the meteors and found them all sterile and spore-less. There had to be some other source or course of the hell scum. So he constructed his theory. Circumstances alone—the mere fact that there is no other explanation for what has happened—is almost sufficient proof that the idea is fact.

  “What happened was this, as dad sees it: The vast cloud of meteors which came into the solar system was largely absorbed by the Sun. The shock of those falling stones from space did things to old Sol. Maybe he felt younger, or something. Maybe materials which exist in his center to-day, but once were also part of his photosphere, were caused to rise briefly to his light-giving outer shell by the impact of the meteors. There those materials or elements acted to produce the radiations, perhaps by the disintegration of their atoms. Any comments or questions so far?”

  “Yes,” Ellayne replied. “Life and rays of any sort are a long way apart. How can there be any connection?”

  “You’re all wrong there, sis.” Roland responded earnestly. “Everybody knows that without the Sun’s rays there couldn’t be any living creatures on the Earth. To green plants light is food, and without those plants there wouldn’t be any animals. And there are other facts to consider when judging the Maynard theory:

  "X rays and the radiations of radium exert a tremendous influence upon both fauna and flora grown where they are present. Experiments of this sort were conducted many years ago. Normal young of any species developed into freaks or sports, quite different in physical characteristics from their parents. Brown rats became albino rats. Fruit flies were curiously distorted.

  “It has long been suspected that the radium present in mountainous regions is a powerful cause of mutation, which furthers quickly the progress of evolution, both animal and plant. Cosmic rays and the periodic radiations of Sun spots have been accused of exciting comparatively innoxious bacteria, thus producing terrible plagues.

  “So, you see, radiations of various kinds can direct, control and sustain vital processes. To suppose that the first primitive life was actually created by a combination of special and transient solar emanations is just another step in connecting this evidence with the great scheme by which our universe operates.

  “Think of the warm, azoic seas at the beginning. Nothing lived in them, even though conditions were ideal. The world was like a tinder pile, waiting for the spark of life. That spark might be, in part, an arrangement of the elements involved—nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen—but a condition that was special and inevitable could aid enormously. Our present visitation began a little differently, for the radiations were stronger than the original ones, and they didn’t last nearly as long. The creation of the scum was more sudden than the first creation. I guess that’s about all I can say, Ellayne.”

  The girl nodded slowly, her mind lost in her brother’s explanation of the great riddle. But abruptly her thoughts came back to the practical present. She moved to the telescope.

  “We’ve got to plot the rocket’s course,” she said. “We’ve got to know exactly where it is going to land. Maybe Amy Forster will be able to tell us what to do.”

  Around the refuge, green slime oozed, its corrosive acids eating metal and softening earth. Beyond the walls men fought the dread menace; while within those walls other men thought and planned and toiled. One of them—a gray, old scientist who slaved in his laboratory, had an idea, among his other ideas, that might make Earth a safe place for human habitation once more. But time was so limited—

  IX.

  Raah of Wan stirred and opened his eyes. There was no sound in the frosty stillness. A glance at the windows of the compartment told him that he was in space.

  Raah raised himself, feeling dizzy, ill and sore. But his own injuries were superficial. His first concern was for Treb. Both the Wanite and the Earthman were at the rear of the compartment, where the jolt of acceleration had thrown them.

  The furry little Lunarian was half-buried in ruined glass and metal. His body was stiff and cold. Raah extricated him from the wreckage, wiped the gore from the great oozing wound on his shoulder.

  Then, for several moments, he chafed the tiny, three-fingered hands of his small friend. This producing no immediate result, he looked about for something to wrap Treb in, and presently found a blanket in a locker. Raah did not know what the blanket’s intended function was, but he used it to good purpose.

  There was nothing more that he could do for the Wanite wizard. And so he crouched dumbly beside him, waiting and hoping for a sign. Once Treb voiced a few plaintive, birdlike twitters, and then lapsed again into a coma.

  Concern forced Raah’s attention to other things. The meters on the broken instrument panels could give him no information now, even if he had been able to read them. But he could look through the windows and learn much. The Moon had dwindled astern, while the Earth was now a huge globe ahead and a little to the right.

  The ship’s propelling mechanism had flamed until all the fuel had been burned up; now all was silence.

  Could the craft reach Earth? Raah had used no mathematics to plot his take-off. The ship had been pointed, very simply, toward its destination; that was all. Time units, and the movements of celestial bodies involved had not been taken into consideration.

  It is a far simpler task, however, to reach Terra from Luna than the reverse. Earth’s gravity, much stronger than that of its satellite, naturally dominates a much larger portion of space, and would tend to correct any slight errors in aim.

  Moreover, since the Moon always keeps the same face turned toward its primary, the Earth, except for the small shifts occasioned by libration, does not move in its sky; so, relatively, the position of Terra from the lunar point of view, changes scarcely at all.

  But how about landing? What provision might this primitive savage make for so delicate a task at so great a speed? Or had such provision been made by the builders of the
vehicle?

  Such questions could give Raah little worry, for his knowledge of the factors involved were too slight. He could only crouch beside the silent Treb, sullen with grief and loneliness.

  Presently he noticed the stuffiness of the air. He opened the valve of an oxygen flask slightly, and after that he felt a bit better. His and Treb’s flame mantles had dimmed until they were almost invisible, even in the semidarkness. Since they were useless now, he shut them off.

  Time dragged slowly by. The Earth was nearer now. It did not take long to consume many thousands of miles while hurtling through the frictionless vacuum at terrific speed.

  Finally Treb became conscious enough to speak a few, halting words. There was hope, and a doglike affection, in his great, glazing eyes.

  “I think—everything—will be well—child of—the unknown,” he said, seeming to draw wisdom from some source beyond his own personal experience.

  The Earthman touched his tiny friend’s forehead reassuringly. “Everything will be well,” he repeated.

  In so far as Treb was concerned, everything was well within an hour. While the rocket sped on toward grim adventure, he passed into the kindly shadows.

  Other hours went by, and Earth appeared to creep nearer and nearer until it was a vast, slightly convex expanse of blurred gray, reflecting bright sunshine. Oceans and continents swept beneath the rocket, as the planet turned slowly on its axis.

  At last a faint whispering filled the narrow compartment. The craft had touched the terrestrial atmosphere.

  The whisper mounted to a shrill hiss. Then there was a slight grating sound astern, followed by a sharp jolt, which was the beginning of the thrusting, crushing agony of deceleration.

  Flattened, pain-racked, against the forward extremity of the chamber, Raah could see through the windows the vast parachute of metallic fabric which had opened up in the still tremendously tenuous air. Had the ’chute been drawn from its metal case astern by a denser medium, the terrific speed of the ship would have torn it to shreds and burned it like a meteoric fragment. But here the resistance was not so dangerous. For once the landing device of a space ship appeared to be working as it should. Twice before, there had been failures.

  Impotent as a scared animal, Raah waited. He felt the creaking and straining of the stout shroud cables of the ’chute. Then there was a snapping jerk, as one or several of them parted. After that the pressure of deceleration was not as intense.

  Down through the atmosphere the rocket fell, its speed still rapidly diminishing. A broad, murky plain was rushing up toward it. Raah saw the sad, jagged skeleton of a ruined city leaping closer. Then the crash came.

  Somehow his senses were not quite wiped out by the impact. Gradually, the initial numbness of shock gave way to searing torture. His left arm was broken; his ribs were cracked; his brain was jangled, until the least attempt at coherent thought was aching effort.

  Weakly, gripped by a gravity six times as strong as Wan’s, he dragged himself to a shattered window, muttering words to the dead Treb. As he looked out on the alien world of his ancestors, nostalgia came over him like a wave. The very daylight seemed obstructed by the pall of doom.

  Thick, pulsating slime, like that which had once floated on the surface of Ikaah, the devil lake, was everywhere. It incrusted the hills and the plain, and the hideous shreds of it dangled from the deserted wreckage of the city near by.

  The spectacle aroused in Raah a mighty wish that he could go back to Wan—even the fiery, quaking Wan that he had last seen. It was a better place to be than this horrible, murky planet of death and swarming, primal life!

  Then he remembered that this was the world of his people, and of the girl whose fresh young beauty had captivated him. His haggard face hardened.

  If he was to accomplish anything, he must act immediately; for he did not know how long his depleted stamina would last.

  He crept to the hatch of the crumpled rocket. A moment later he stood unsteadily atop the battered vehicle, fighting his weakness and his new and unaccustomed weight. The hoisting sphere might have helped sustain him, but it had been lost in space.

  The musty air was humid and hot. Though he did not know it, the presence of the alien hell scum had altered Earth’s climate, so that snow and ice did not form, even in the extreme north and south. The character of the terrestrial atmosphere had been changed; more carbon dioxide, resulting from the vital processes of the scum, had been put into it, increasing its capacity to absorb and retain the warmth of Sunshine. The resulting hot climate had also made the air much more than normally humid, providing a source for heavy rains, which had defeated even the driest deserts on the face of the planet.

  Vaguely Raah heard a distant, droning sound; but it scarcely registered on his numbed faculties. And so, moved by impulse born of the desire to reach his mysterious people, he lowered himself from the broken rocket. He sank to his knees in the sticky, squirming ooze, which, under a microscope, would have revealed itself to be composed of minute droplets of protoplasm, part animal and part plant.

  At once his agony increased, as the minute creatures tried to absorb the flesh of his bare legs. Now he moved the switch on his metal cap, but the flame mantle thus recreated was far too faint to provide any real protection.

  Voicing a thick cry, he swooned, his body toppling forward into the voracious slime. Raah of Wan had been strong and courageous, but flesh has its limitations and there are problems which even the keen, trained minds of scientists cannot solve.

  He was not aware of it when a plane’s pontoons splashed into the scum and glided toward him. Young hands, protected by the gloves of air-tight armor, raised him and carried him into the craft.

  X.

  A week passed, during which Raah was the victim of a fevered delirium, which was perhaps partly the result of exposure to microbes that were part of the hell scum. But in spite of his illness, he was conscious of a thousand novelties. Strange clothing covered his body; unfamiliar bandages swathed his injuries; he was lying in a curious white bed in a white room. Antiseptic odors were always in his nostrils.

  Many people with weary faces and eyes bright with the terror of doom came to talk to him—and to plead with him. He could not understand their tongue, but he knew that they were pleading, and he knew why; but he had no information to offer them that would be of the least help. Sometimes he heard distant cries of fear, and felt the vibrating jolts of walls shifting on their foundations. He sensed that the end of this great Earthly fortress was not far off.

  The situation, of course, had many aspects which even his sharp intuition could not see. He could know little of the shortages of synthetic food, of the scarcity of poisons and other materials used in combating the scum. So many people had been drawn from the small populace to engage in the actual fighting that few remained to handle the less immediate, though just as vital, demands of manufacture.

  And Raah could, of course, have no inkling of the countless, teeming thoughts that flashed across the busy brain of old John Maynard, toiling in his laboratory, struggling with a problem which he knew would yield in time, if the time was given him.

  Only once did the scientist come to look at Raah; then he turned away with regret in his old eyes. This visitor from the Moon was scarcely more than a simple cave man, and could be of no help.

  After that old John spent his scant moments of relaxation in the botanical and zoological gardens of the refuge, finding some scant, reminiscent comfort in the plants and animals that had belonged to the old Earth of his younger days.

  With Ellayne Maynard it was different. She came to the hospital quarters as often as she could. Frequently she was weary and grimed from work in the factories; but she never seemed to lose her poise and her jaunty gayety.

  Somehow, in spite of his illness and his apparent ignorance, there was a reassuring quality about this strange young man whose muscles were unusually hard and supple, and whose incoherent, alien words were softer and more beautiful than the
words of any language spoken on Earth. Besides, there was an unmistakable resemblance between this stranger and Amy Forster, whose cool-eyed picture hung in John Maynard’s study. This was her child, beyond doubt.

  And so Ellayne studied the enigma he represented, her judgment vague but hopeful. This boy was a hard one to restrain; always he was trying to get out of bed, apparently to join the battlers beyond the walls. Always he was calling some one or something named Treb.

  Ellayne tried to talk to him, not so much in the hope that he would understand, as to relieve her own feelings. Mutual attraction was swiftly becoming mutual need; for to Raah the girl’s visits seemed as essential to his recovery as food and rest.

  “It’s funny about you, Forster,’’ she’d say companionably. “Maybe you don’t even realize it, but your mother went to the Moon for a purpose. You see, when your father circled the satellite, he found that there was a valley on its hidden hemisphere. In his notes, which were read after his space ship crashed and he was killed, he mentioned that in so far as he had been able to discover, there was no hell scum in the valley, or at least not much. And that is something we can’t understand.

  “This was odd, because the Moon must be exposed to the same conditions—they weren’t understood then—which had produced the scum on Earth. Some other condition, causing immunity, must exist there. So your mother went to find out what that condition was. It might help us out a lot if we knew. Did you happen to learn anything?’’

  It was no use. Gaining mastery of a totally alien language is not an easy task for any one. Raah could understand the motive of the girl’s obvious plea; but even if these two could have conversed fluently, it is doubtful that the man could have supplied information the importance of which a native Earthling could see.