Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction

by Sam Moskowitz

  Without it, the ship's gravitation prisoned him. He could not escape. Where was the patrol boat?

  He could not locate it among the star-points. Well, it scarcely mattered now. He was in for it. Breath misted the faceplate of his helmet, and he turned on the heater coils.

  Esterling felt a little sick when he reached the place where the bow had been. The entire nose of the ship had been blown off. Fragments of scrap and parts of bodies were plastered against the hull, covered by a treacly black fluid which Esterling recognized as rocket fuel. He paused on the jagged edge of the gap, peering down into the hole that had been blasted out of the ship. After a moment he took a deep breath and swung into the darkness.

  Ten minutes later he returned to the control cabin and stripped off his suit. Beale was still praying. Damon was at the controls, mopping at his face with a crimson handkerchief. He looked up.

  "Well? What damage?"

  "Nobody's alive but us three."

  "What damage to the ship?" Beale shrilled. "Good heavens, man, that's the important thing!"

  Esterling grinned unpleasantly. "Did you know the Vulcan carried a full cargo of rocket fuel?"

  "What of it?" Beale asked.

  Damon turned sharply, a cold rage in his eyes. He showed his teeth in a snarl.

  "Damn!" The oath exploded from him.

  "Yeah," Esterling said. "The nose of the ship is blown off, and the inside bulkheads won't stand atmospheric friction. When we hit air again, the plates will get plenty hot. Rocket fuel won't explode without heat and oxygen, so we're safe as long as we're in space. But the minute we touch atmosphere, we go up like a rocket."

  "Good heavens!" Beale gasped, ringers fluttering at his lips. "Damon, we've got to unload that fuel!"

  The captain snorted. "In space? We can't. The ship's gravity would pull it right back again."

  "Then we've got to land on an airless planet and unload it!" Damon pointed at the visiscreen. "The patrol boat's following our jets. We're faster, but the minute we slow down, they'll be on our tail. Nope. We've just got to keep going till we lose the patrol. After that—"

  "Yes. I suppose so. We'll head out, eh?"

  "It's the safest course. We'll jet toward Pluto."

  Esterling lit a cigarette. "You're spacetight. You can't dodge the patrol. Why not call it a day and send out a white jet?"

  Beale shook his head. "We can't do that. Once we reach the Black Planet we'll be safe."

  "We'd better be," Damon said. "Just to make you feel better, I might as well tell you the Vulcan's washed up. Our bow tubes are gone. We can make a crash landing, with spacesuits, but we can't take off again. You still think we'll find spaceships on the black world?"

  "Yes. Yes, indeed. The winged people visited Earth, as well as other planets, in the past. It's a gamble, of course, but—"

  "It's a gamble we've got to take." Damon looked at Esterling sardonically. "Want a gun?"

  "Eh?"

  "Here." The captain tossed over a compressed-air automatic. "I don't know what we'll find on the Black Planet, but it may be trouble. You won't use that blaster on us, anyway. D'you think the patrol would believe we'd kidnapped you?" Esterling slowly bolstered the weapon. "I suppose not. But you're taking a chance.”

  "I don't think so. We’ll split with you on whatever we find on the black world. According to Beale, that'll mean big money. Enough to buy off the law. Try any tricks, and the best you can expect is a patrol trial, with the cards stacked against you. Hell, keep the gun," Damon finished, with a careless shrug. "You're no fool. You'll play along."

  "Yeah," Esterling said. "There's not much else I can do, I guess." Damon chuckled.

  Crippled, broken, a deadly time-bomb, the Vulcan thundered on into the eternal night of the void. The Asteroid Belt lay behind, with its flickering glare-dance of sunlight on the tiny worlds. Immense Jupiter grew larger, a pearly globe with a scarlet wound raw upon its surface—and Jupiter faded and dwindled.

  Ringed Saturn was on the other side of the System, but Uranus watched them from the visiplate. They were beyond the Life Zone now. It was too cold, too far from the sun, for life to exist except under artificial conditions. Here and there on frigid moons a few space domes were spotted, outposts of lonely pioneers. But there were not many. Uranus was the borderline, the invisible wall beyond which it was not safe to venture.

  The deadly emptiness of the interstellar wastes had reached in with fingers of fiery cold and touched the worlds that swung too far from the sun. They were accursed. Stones from ruined cities had been found here, artifacts so old that no remotely human race could have built them. The freezing tides of space and time, pulsing in eon long beats, had swept up and buried them, and receded for a little while. He had never been this far out. In the long weeks on the Vulcan a change came upon Nils Esterling, a blood heritage that fought its way to the surface and brought out all the latent mysticism of his race. He was plumbing uncharted seas, as his forefathers had done, and something deep within the man, atavistic and powerful, woke to life.

  There's a legend that spacemen get their souls frozen on their first voyage. Esterling had been away from Earth for only a few years, but those years had been deadly ones. Planetary voyages are gruelling, racking jobs for the men who work the ships, and, on the far-flung, exotic worlds of the System, there is nothing akin to the green meadows and blue oceans of Earth. The red ochre of Mars blasts the vision; the stinging yellow fogs of Venus creep into your pores; the shifting rainbow light of Callisto shocks your nerves into jolting madness. Men do not live long in space—no! So, while they live, they make the most of the little they possess. There are flaming brews from Blueland moss, distilled and potent with dreams. There is cold, stealthy satha, and there is the sweet mznga-liqueur they make in Ednes, on Venus. There is segzr-whiskey that turns the mind into red fire. There is absinthe from Earth and Fruit o' Worlds made by the dbrk monks of Io. And there are drugs. The sins of all the Systems are at the call of those who can pay. Nils had gone down that dark path, for there was little choice. In a few years he had grown cold, reckless, embittered. He had tasted the exultation of space flight, and after that Earth would have seemed dull. Ahead of him lay more years alternating periods of arduous voyages and wild sprees. Nothing else. In the end, death, and space burial.

  The life had toughened him, building a harsh shell under which the old idealism had died to an ember. But now—there was a difference.

  Three thousand years before his ancestors had gone Viking, their red-sailed ships driving out from the Northland fjords. Recklessly they had pushed on into unknown seas. The lure of mysteries, of exploration, drove them on. That touched Nils Esterling now.

  The patrol ship had been lost long since. They were utterly alone, in an emptiness almost inconceivable to the human mind. The old motionless brilliance of the stars merely enhanced their isolation. Day after day the ship roared on through the void, and nothing changed; the sun remained a small yellow star, and the Milky Way lay across the dark sky like Bifrost Bridge that reaches to Asgard. Bifrost, the Bright Rainbow, across which the Valkyries thunder, bearing the souls of warriors fallen in battle.

  Legend was not far from fact in this inhuman place, the airless void where man penetrated only by suffrance, venturing in tiny ships that a meteor could destroy easily. Nils Esterling felt the mysticism of far places stealing into his soul. He had felt thus before, once in the Euphrates Valley where the Garden of Eden had been created; and again on Easter Island, facing the silent carved titans whose origins are hidden by the past.

  There were gateways and barriers, he thought—walls built to keep intruders from venturing too far. Man had not conquered space. He had reached the nearer worlds, but beyond, in the vastoess of the galaxies, lay mysteries. Closer even than that! A black planet, rolling majestically, invisible, on the edge of the System, holding its secrets . . . .

  What were those secrets?

  Sometimes skepticism came back, and Esterling sneered at his ow
n credulity. How could a planet have remained undiscovered through the ages, beyond the orbit of Pluto?

  It would have to be invisible.

  But even as long ago as the Twentieth Century astronomers had suspected the existence of a trans-Plutonian world, one so far out from the sun that its influence was negligible, a world unseen, lost in the incredible immensity of space.

  Yes. The Black Planet could exist.

  Beale spent hours on abstruse calculations. He had figured dead reckoning by the runes on Esterling's bracelet, and Damon changed the course accordingly. The little scientist peered into the visiplate, using the telescopic attachment, but he could catch no glimpse of his goal.

  "It must be invisible," he said. "That's a good sign." Esterling stared at him. "Why?"

  "In the plan of nature nothing is normally invisible, at least nothing of planetary size. That means the camouflage was created artificially. Physicists have speculated about the possibility of a negasphere—"

  "I've seen dead-black planetoids," Damon broke in. "You never saw them till you were within a few hundred miles."

  "Planetoids are small. And their presence could be detected by occlusion. An artificial negasphere would have the property of warping light-ray. Dwarf stars can draw light toward them, you know. A negasphere could bend it away—around the planet. The world wouldn't hide any stars with its bulk."

  They watched the visiplate, but there was nothing there except the frozen rivers of stars in the night sky.

  Monotonously time dragged on. There was neither sunrise nor sunset; they ate when hungry, slept when tired. Always the doomed ship fled on into the darkness. Until—

  There was no warning. One moment they were in empty space; the next, Damon, at the controls, cried out harshly and cut the jets. The screen flamed white. A bell began to ring shrilly.

  "What is it?" Beale hurried toward Damon, leaning over the captain's shoulder. He gasped. Esterling pushed him aside, eying the visiplate.

  On the field a world was visible, huge, luminous, distinctly limned against the misty background of the stars. It had sprung out of nothingness. But it was not black. It blazed with cold, swirling radiance, tides of living light rolled across it.

  "The Black Planet," Damon said. "But—"

  Beale's voice was shrill with excitement. "There was a nega-sphere! We went through it without realizing. Of course! It isn't a tangible barrier; it's just a hollow shell of darkness around the planet. Out here, on the edge of the System—" He was silent, staring at the immense jewel-world that lay before them. Esterling said. "We're in atmosphere. Look at those stars— misty, see? We can't stay with the ship."

  Damon put the Vulcan at automatic controls, circling inward in a narrowing spiral. The alarm bell was still ringing.

  "Yeah. We'd better get into our suits. Come on!"

  They struggled with the fastenings. A jolting shock wrenched the vessel. Esterling snapped his helmet shut, looked to see that he had his rocket harness and gun, and lumbered toward the lock, awkward in the heavy spaceboots. He swung open the valve.

  On the lips of empty space he paused, looking down. Far beneath him the shining planet lay. He could not gauge its size. There were fewer stars now; the negasphere did not seem to block their light, but the atmosphere did. There was an instant of sickening giddiness before he stepped out.

  Then he was hurtling down, and panic clutched at his throat. Instinctively he pressed the stud that activated his rocket-harness, and his flight was arrested. Two figures shot past him, grotesque in their suits, Beale and Damon. They were gone. He dropped again; there was still a long way to fall, and he did not wish to exhaust his fuel. The Vulcan slowly passed him, its tubes firing spasmodically, driving it down to destruction. From the smashed bow a tongue of flame licked up. There was oxygen in this atmosphere, then.

  A Viking funeral for the dead men on the ship, Esterling thought. Against the blackness of the sky red fire blazed suddenly. It was like a beacon—

  Struck by a new thought, he glanced down. The flames would certainly attract attention, if there was any life on the Black Planet. But what life could exist on that pearly, shinning globe, seething with luminous tides?

  Still he fell. The Vulcan blazed, red against the dark. How many spacemen had watched similar sights, watched their vessels crack up while they remained alone in space, without hope of rescue? No marooned sailor could ever have felt one-tenth of the utter desolation that pressed in from the void. The seas of Earth were wide, but the seas of space had no shores.

  He could not see Beale or Damon. What would happen when he reached the world below? Would those shining tides swallow him? There could be no life there!

  Emptiness, and falling, and an hypnotic languor that dulled Esterling's brain. Across the sky the Milky Way flamed. Bifrost, where the Valkyries rode, the spear-maidens of Asgard. The Valkyries—

  Wings beat soundlessly past him.

  For a timeless second a face looked into Esterling's. The blood drummed in his temples. Hallucination, he thought. For she could not exist!

  Her hair was corn-yellow, her eyes as blue as the southern ocean. No curve of her slender body was hidden by the single gossamer garment she wore, and in all his life Esterling had never seen a girl half so lovely.

  Nor half so strange!

  Pinions lifted from her shoulders; wings, shining with coruscating light, upheld her in emptiness. She was winged!

  One moment the girl hung there, her gaze probing into Esterling's. Then a touch of elfin malice came into the blue eyes. She made a quick gesture—and Esterling was swung off balance by an abrupt tug at his harness. Still falling, he revolved slowly in midair, in time to see another girl, almost a duplicate of the first, holding his rocket harness.

  She had ripped it away—and Esterling was falling free, with nothing to halt his plunge to the glowing world beneath!

  His mouth was dry with sudden panic; he wrenched out his gun. Apparently the winged girls knew the meaning of the weapons. The one holding the harness let it drop, and in perfect unison they dived toward Esterling. Handicapped as he was by his bulky suit, he had little chance. A hand gripped his arm. The gun was forced up and back. Falling through space, he could get no leverage, no way of exerting his strength.

  Helpless, he fought the Valkyries.

  It was useless, as he knew from the start. They were in their own element, agile, strong, deft. In the end he let them tear the gun from him, a suicidal hopelessness overcoming him. But the girls did not wish him to die, it seemed. Their arms wrapped about him, while the great pinions pulsed and beat. Esterling's fall slowed. Far below, the planet grew larger. The tides of light swept across its surface. It filled half the sky. The Vulcan, still afire, plunged down and was swallowed by the luminous glow.

  The world grew concave, then flat. Perspective changed. The sphere no longer hung in the void; it was an immense, seething ocean beneath. On that glowing sea were islands— and they drove with the mighty tides like ships.

  Cities were built on the isles, fragile-seeming, with a curious architecture, unlike anything Esterling had seen before. There was no regular pattern. Some of the islands were huge, others tiny. But all were garden places, spotted with clusters of towers and minarets that were like lustrous jewels.

  The Hesperides—the Isles of the Blessed. Oceans of living light washed those strange shores. Across the rolling, seething seas the islands moved majestically, flotsam of a lost planet.

  Toward one of them Esterling dropped, a prisoner of the Valkyries. He saw above the towers a myriad darting shapes, flying with graceful, easy movements. The winged people! Nor were they all women; there were men among them, their wings stronger, darker.

  Walls lifted above Esterling. He was being carried down a shaft. There was an instant of dizzying confusion, during which he was half-blinded by wings flailing and beating about him. Then he felt the strong arms relax.

  Solid ground was under his feet. He stood on a little platform of som
e plastic, blue-tinted substance. Behind him a passageway gaped in the wall. From his feet the pit dropped down to unknown depths.

  The Valkyries alighted beside him. He felt slim fingers fumbling with his helmet, and, too late, made a gesture to halt the girl. The faceplate swung back. The air of the new world rushed into his lungs.

  One breath told him that there was no danger. It was pure, fresh, and sweet, with a subtle tingling exhilaration that was almost intoxicating. Blue eyes laughed into Esterling's.

  "D'rn sa asth'neeso." The words were meaningless, but the gesture that accompanied them was significant. Esterling hesitated. A Valkyrie slipped past him, folded her wings like a cloak about her. She moved into the depths of the passage.

  "lyan sa!"

  He followed, the other girl at his heels. A tapestry was flung aside, and he found himself in an apartment, obviously a sleeping-chamber, though not built for humans. The walls were transparent as glass.

  He was, apparently, in one of the tallest towers. Beneath him lay the city. Beyond that, a luxuriance of rainbow forest, and, farther away, the, blazing turmoil of the sea of light. The winged people swooped and glided among the towers. The Valkyrie Esterling had first seen came closer. She murmured a few liquid, trilling syllables, and her companion vanished. Then, smiling fearlessly up into Esterling's eyes, she tapped the chest of his spacesuit and made a movement of inquiry.

  His voice sounded harsh in the silence.

  "Yeah. I don't need this, I guess." Gratefully he unburdened himself of the awkward overall garment and helmet.

  The girl touched her breast. "Norahn." She repeated it. "Norahn—Norahn."

  "Norahn," Esterling said. Her name? He imitated her gesture. "Nils." There was a scuffle behind them. A group of Valkyries appeared from beyond the curtain, among them two struggling figures—Beale and Damon. They paused at sight of Esterling. Damon snapped open his helmet.