At the end of a year the survivors had accomplished miracles. Part of the city had been rebuilt underground—was a passably comfortable region, quiet and law abiding. There were all the necessities of life now; resurrected synthesizing machines had seen to that. Amongst other things, Petlo had had the Observatory reflector remounted in his own laboratory, its nose poking inquisitively toward a dome of pure, undistorting, newly-blown glass. Save for a slight furriness of image occasioned by the glass, the instrument worked perfectly.
For endless hours Petlo studied the second world during the cold night, brooded over its atmosphere and now-consequent high albedo. With malicious care he studied its whirling little moon, brilliantly lighted by both sunshine and primary light. He made copious notes of what he saw in the valleys of that moon, smiled grimly, but held his counsel.
His main object thereafter was we reconditioning of one of the two surviving rocket ships. It took five weeks to fit it out in spaceworthy style, and once it was done he set off alone into space, headed directly for that brilliantly gleaming world and its moon so close to the Sun. He would do nothing rash—that was all he would promise to the anxious Nidia and his friends.
Sixteen long weeks afterward he returned from his sojourn, grim-faced, more resolute than ever, but still divulging little of his plans. Instead, hc set to work—after a series of private experiments—upon the construction of a highly sensitive remote-control radio transmitter. This was his special field, but to had to surmount constant obstacles due to lack of material and the necessity of having to make s»me of it firsthand. But in the end his ingenuity, untiring energy, and the assistance of his friends succeeded in creating an apparatus of remarkably delicate power, able to extend its influence across the void from his own world to the second one.
When Halvan or Nidia questioned him his only response was a cold, bitter smile. Instead of giving any information he turned next to the reconditioning of the retaining rocket ship, fitted it with automatic blast controls, carefully timed, and switchboard mechanism attuned by a complicated radio receiver to his own short-wave transmitter.
Then he spent three weeks loading the ship very carefully with loose ixion powder, perhaps the most powerful explosive known to the planet and used in the boring of mines and rocket-ship detonators. He had found the stuff still unharmed in the depths of its steel armory deep under the half-shattered Association Building.
“But what’s it all for?” demanded Halvan one night, when at last the ship had been loaded and the two families reclined comfortably within their basement. “What are you trying to do? Hurl that ship of ixion at Jalva? If so, it won’t avail you much. The dense atmosphere will explode it long before it reaches its surface, and at best you’ll only kill a few.”
Petlo smiled grimly. “Nothing so childish as that, Halvan,” he answered Steadily. “When I went on that space trip my object was to discover the reason for brown smears visible through the telescope in the valleys of Jalva’s moon. I found the smears were spores, and when I tested them here in warmth and oxygen and hydrogen they sprouted into plants—emitted a toxic, carbon dioxide, which is of course definitely fatal to an oxygen breather. The Jalvians are oxygen breathers. We know that because they took our atmosphere!”
“Well?” questioned Halvan quietly.
Petlo went on talking with fevered earnestness. “I plan to fire that second rocket ship to Jalva’s moon, guide it there by remote-control radio. Once it strikes, it will explode with devastating violence. There will be no atmospheric resistance whatever—the explosion of all that ixion in one mighty burst will shatter that three thousand-mile moon into absolute meteoric dust. The outcome is obvious. The dust and the spores will sift down in a dense carpet to Jalva’s surface. The spores will sprout! Time and time again the Jalvians may mow them down, try and destroy them—but one cannot forever defeat a thing of that nature any more than before the cataclysm we could utterly have destroyed all green stuff. These plants multiply with incredible speed and will thrive in that warmth and moisture. Finally, they will drive the Jalvians away from their planet by their very toxic emanations.”
“In generations to come, maybe,” Halvan acceded, thinking. “I am dealing with generations to come,” Petlo answered strangely, a far-away look in his yellow eyes. “I am dealing with a time that lies in the far future—so far away we cannot picture it, when by the natural law of inheritance and a reasonable supply of luck I expect to attain my revenge. When my son, Ladima, and your daughter, Esonia, reach maturity they must marry. It is essential! In the last stages of my plan, another world will play its part—the third world, the young one we call Kilbani.”
Halvan said nothing. He listened silently as Petlo went on.
“My next scheme is the hardest and mightiest of all. I plan to drive an irrigation system right across the face of our world—yes, from pole to pole—a network from the icecaps. For water, but also for another, profounder reason. For revenge! Later, you will see my point. First the rocket ship must be fired. Ages may elapse before the spores from that moon become sufficiently annoying to finally impregnate the Jalvian atmosphere with their toxics and render it too poisonous for the Jalvians to remain. I intend to dispatch the rocket tonight.”
“But how does this canal system fit in with the spore idea?” Halvan questioned. “What has it to do with it?”
“Everything,” Petlo answered, and smiled mysteriously.
* * * *
The rocket ship was fired from its 45-degree cradle two hours later, from a point situated in the lone area of the dead sea bottom. Petlo’s calculations, worked out to the last detail, had assured him that the automatic controls would work perfectly with his radio. The rocket tubes only needed the initial automatic blast to drive the machine out beyond the gravitational field and thinned atmosphere. In free space it would move by perpetual motion, guided by the radio waves.
Petlo set the time switch of the rocket-firing chambers, locked the airlock from the outside; then, wrapped to the ears in furs, he returned with Halvan to the position of their underground home and laboratory. By the time they had reached it the blasting roar of the rockets smote on their ears. The ship hurtled skyward in a long arc of flaming, vivid light, climbing into a remote, disappearing point that was swallowed up in the clear, motionless glitter of the stars.
Without speaking the two descended into the laboratory. Halvan took up his position before the telescope mirror. Petlo sat before his switchboard, hands tightly gripping the polished knobs that controlled, in conjunction with mathematical predictions, every movement of that hurtling, unseen flyer in the deeps of space.
Both of them sat hour after hour, the womenfolk bringing them food and hot drink at intervals. They dared not sleep; hardly dared to move, until their task was accomplished. They sat thus for nearly four days and nights, checking each other’s figures, charting and recharting the route the rocket must be taking. Halvan held the Venusian moon in the field of the great reflector by night, occasionally watching the flicking second hand of the chronometer.
Until at last, in a voice that ached with weariness, Halvan began to count, “Twenty-five—twenty-six—!” He stopped, smitten with awe. He was aware of Petlo and the others breathing hard over his shoulder.
Suddenly, amazingly, the calmly floating satellite of Venus spewed and belched outward in a trillion hurtling shards, broke up and splintered and smashed into boulders, stones, and vast swirling hazes of dust. The atmosphere of the mother planet writhed and boiled under the sudden alteration in gravitational fields. Somewhere under those clouds, oceans must have spilled over, convulsed into tidal waves, before they settled down to almost tideless seas.
The whole thing seemed to be over in minutes—but in those minutes a moon had died and settled into an enormous carpet of hazy fragments settling slowly toward the dense clouds. Petlo had been right in his judgment: the terrific explosion and inward thrust, together with the pull of Venus, had prevented the stuff forming into rings
and, instead, forced it downward far enough to prevent the slightest suggestion of orbital formation.
Petlo drew a deep breath of relief, slumped wearily into a chair. In a few minutes both he and Halvan were sleeping heavily.
* * * *
For several weeks afterward Petlo and his people made no moves. They half expected a spaceship to arrive from the second world to retaliate for the thing they had done. Finally they began to realize that the Jalvians must have interpreted the death of their moon to some cosmic catastrophe and not to a deliberately planned act by minds on a world they fully believed now quite dead. Besides, they probably had their hands full in dealing with the disastrous effects of tidal waves and the sudden growth of toxic plant spores.
So, feeling secure again, Petlo set to work on his mighty canal scheme. The simplest and most direct method was to use high-powered blast-guns operated from the few remaining fast tractors. This was done, every one of the men survivors being pushed into service, whilst the womenfolk attended to their domestic needs.
Even so, progress was slow. To de-sign some thirty networking canals across a globe 4,000 miles in diameter demanded perpetual toil and work—by weeks, by months, by years. But Petlo still went doggedly on, ruthlessly determined to bring his strange plans to fruition.
At the end of a year ferric oxide was making obvious inroads on the planet. The old metal girders and skeletal walls of buildings were brightly red; the sea bottoms and vast devastated deserts crawled with rust. The air, too, was becoming dehydrated—the upper levels of hydrogen were leaking away into space, held only by Mars’ slight gravity. The essential mixture for life was vanishing. At the most, the planet had only another century of breathable atmosphere left.
Petlo worked with renewed vigor, driving his canals across the plains, linking them up with central oases around which there grew a new type of planet adapted to an air that was almost wholly thin oxygen. Ceaslessly, endlessly, red sand flew skyward before the battering blast-guns. An army of determined avengers gouged their planet from end to end, and only Petlo knew the purpose toward which he worked.
Two years—three years—five years, before the canal system was complete. Water flowed from pole to pole, to some extent irrigated the desert, but with the dehydrating air, life was still impossible on the surface. Petlo, however, seemed quite satisfied with his work, took a special care to initiate his son and Halvan’s daughter—now eighteen and seventeen respectively—into every detail of his plans, impressed upon their young minds the paramount necessity for vengeance—
Then, after two months’ rest, Petlo started his last and ultimate feat—one that demanded all the scientific instruments of which the planet was capable.
He set to work on the construction of an enormous turbine, shafted to a dynamo able to develop immense power. This machine in itself, executed in the Martian foundries manned by laborers, together with the attendant careful planning, took another year—and afterward more time was swallowed up in the making of two vast obelisks of pure copper coated with a rust-resisting and highly conductive alloy. Both of them were 300 feet long and 50 feet wide at their bases, their tips tapering to a point. Once these were finished, heavily insulated wires wound on massive drums were manufactured, together with numberless sheets of metal tested to withstand a pressure of 1,000 pounds to the square inch.
Most of this apparatus was then transferred to the south pole, accompanied by dredging and construction machines for the purpose of drilling a shaft beneath the icecap to a depth of 500 feet. The top glacier was removed for a square mile and the water constantly pumped away whilst the supporting sheets of metal were slid into position and firmly bolted and welded.
Lower the shaft sank, and lower still, until at the base it was made to widen out into a buried power chamber, likewise supported from the water and ice pressure by the prearranged metal sheets.
Two more years passed swiftly over in the construction of the power chamber. One of the massive copper obelisks was lowered to the exact center of the chamber and sunk inti a pit fifty feet deep, filled in with insulated material that cooled to the hardness of age-old granite.
Then the turbine and dynamo were lowered and assembled. The latter was wired up to the copper electrode, and the former so devised that it was directly under a subsidiary shaft in contact with the flood waters below the ice-cap—the shaft being so arranged that after the waters had supplied their rush to the turbine they would be turned off into the exterior again through sluices without any danger of flooding the chamber.
The vent hole of the turbine water shaft was in effect a huge metal cap, held in place by a massive bolt linked by a complicated contrivance of machinery to yet another of Petlo’s short wave, remote radio-control receivers. Once that remote-control apparatus was actuated, the shaft vent would dislodge itself and start the machinery, transmitting rising voltage of electricity in the dynamo and thence transferring the power to the copper electrode in the water outside.
The metal cap of the turbine shaft would remain open for sixty minutes, then an automatic spring actuated by a weight, would suddenly block the sluices and allow the chamber to flood. The whole idea was indeed a masterpiece of automatic engineering, capable of control from any distance—
And at the opposite Martian pole, during the interval, the other copper obelisk had been sunk in like fashion, but without a power house around it. It was, in truth, the negative pole of this astounding planet-sized battery.
Petlo’s work was done. By the time the various equipments had been gathered together for the return journey, the icecaps had frozen over the copper electrodes and hidden them from sight. Thus buried, unexposed to the activity of oxygen in the open air, and composed of highly resistant metals, they could by very reason of their toughness survive for uncounted generations, until the day when automatic control would release that flawless vent machinery and set the vast turbine and dynamo in action. To the coming of such a day, Petto had directed all his energies, and the energies of his people.
“There is little left for us to do,” was Petlo’s announcement to his colleagues, when they had returned to buried Kilanton. “The remainder is left to chance, to natural laws, which will work out their destiny with the passage of time. In the far future, as I see it, the Jalvians will seek another world—driven from their own by the attack of the toxic plants. They could go to the third world, but I don’t think they will, because it would mean involving themselves in battle with a race grown to scientific maturity, who would sadly deplete their numbers. No, I believe they will come here and try to repeat the heinous offence of stealing water and atmosphere from the third world. They will start to adapt their people for migration to this planet, will probably arrange that each succeeding generation can live in less gravitational strain. It can be done by a process of slow training. Upon their coming here depends the whole scheme upon which I have worked—”
“And now?” questioned Halvan.
Petlo looked across at the young man and woman whom he had seen grow from children—his own son, erect and tall, and the graceful dark-headed Esonia, herself a majestic figure seven feet high. They returned his look in silence as they sat close beside each other.
“The fate of a world probably hangs in your hands,” Petlo said at last, slowly. “You know what I have done, have followed his every move. It is impressed in your minds to the exclusion of all else, together with the absolute need for vengeance. A year ago you were married according to our law; your child, or children, when born, will likewise possess your inherited strains and much of your knowledge. On that I have built: That our race can inherit knowledge from generation to generation. Your children’s children will have it again, and so on through the generations until, when the time comes, a true native of this planet will appear and will know what is expected of him or her. Deep down in the brain of this unborn will be the memory of an object to be accomplished, a purpose to be achieved— You will go to the third world—tonight!”
Ladima started up. “But, father, it’s a poisonous world, full of strange gases, landslides, floods— We may die.”
“You will not die,” Petlo returned, with calm decision. “Parts of that world are poisonous, but not all of it. Telescopic observation reveals many rifts in the clouds to the north, even signs of men not unlike ourselves, but smaller. And there are beasts—monstrous beasts, which will fall swiftly before your modem weapons. You will go, live in your rocket ship if need be, teach your as yet unborn child all the things I have taught you, and he in turn must teach his child. And so it shall go on, until the final hour—”
“And you?” the girl questioned quickly.
Petlo smiled faintly and shrugged. “My work is done, my dear. The future belongs to you and Ladima.”
And at sunset, when the desert was like a lake of molten fire, the lone rocket ship bearing husband and wife swept swiftly toward the stars, turned in a huge curve, and headed for the distant orb of the third world.
The entire survivors of Kilanton watched it go and on the stern face of Viranicus Petlo there lurked the ghost of a smile—
V
But Petlo had been wrong in his assumption that his son and the young wife would survive the rigors of the third world. They landed safely enough, even ventured outside into the steamy, sweltering forest in which their vessel landed—but in ten minutes they were separated, attacked by a horde of savage men and women against whom they stood no chance. They tried to run, but the gravity held them down in its crushing load. They saw each other for the last time.
Months afterward, in the wild, primitive reaches of the forest, Esonia’s child was born—but in exchange for his life, the woman’s flickered out. Uncouth, savage eyes looked down upon the little mite that had come into their midst. Roughly, they began to care for it.
The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack Page 4