A.D. 2153
The Continent Makers
I.
Gordon Graham looked up from his calculations as the telephone on his wrist tinkled. When he activated the receiver, the voice of his brother Ivor spoke from the little instrument: “Gordon?”
“Yeah, what is it?” drawled Gordon Graham.
“Busy tonight?”
“We-ell, I’m doing some figuring on the Project . . .”
“Look, will you come down out of your scientific cloud long enough to take over one of my tourists this evening?”
“Huh? What sort of tourist?” said Gordon Graham in tones of alarm.
He had been through this before. Once he’d promised to show New York nightlife to a member of Ivor’s guided tour when Ivor was otherwise occupied. The tourist had turned out to be an ostrichman from Thor with a voice like a foghorn in disrepair. All evening, far from enjoying the sight of the noted strippeuse, Ayesha van Leer, doing her famous fig leaf song, the Thorian had honked into Gordon’s ear his bitter complaints about the “partition” of his planet.
It seemed that nearly a hundred years previously, in the early days of interstellar exploration, a party of Earthmen had bought a thinly inhabited Thorian continent from the chiefs of its primitive natives for some ridiculous price: a record player with a stack of symphonic records and a case of Irish whiskey, or something like that. When the Irish was gone and the player broken, the Thorians had demanded their continent back. Wherefore there had been a little war in which the Thorians with their spears and boomerangs had come off second best.
By the time the civilized Thorians of the other continents had roused themselves to take a serious view of the matter, a Terrestrial colony was flourishing and a whole new Earthly generation had grown up on the disputed continent. These circumstances led the Interplanetary Supreme Court to decide that the Thorians might not expel the Earthmen, who had come legally and had been allowed to live there undisturbed for many decades. On the other hand the Interplanetary Council had adopted rules to prevent advanced peoples from taking advantage of backward ones again . . .
All of which Gordon’s Thorian had recounted in molecular detail in his honking accent until Gordon had nearly gone mad from boredom.
And then there had been the time he let Ivor talk him into taking one of the latter’s tourists to the zoo. The tourist had proved to be an Osirian, a scaly creature like a small bipedal dinosaur a head taller than a man, with a complicated design painted on its bare hide. The animals had thrown such fits that the keepers ordered Gordon and his companion out, much to Gordon’s embarrassment.
“It’s a Krishnan this time,” said Ivor. “A girl. Practically human, too; you’ll like her.”
“Yeah?” said Gordon Graham. “You said I’d like that ostrichman from Thor . . .”
“No, no, this isn’t like that at all. She’s a member of the tour from the republic of Katai-Jhogorai, which is the most cultured state on the planet; all carefully selected people too. This being Sunday, the other gawkers are resting at the Cosmo, but I promised to take Jeru-Bhetiru—that’s her name—out to Boonton to visit relatives in the extra-terrestrial colony. That was okay, but she met some Osirian out there who told her about some society that meets in the Bronx tonight and sold her the idea of going. Since her boyfriend who’s studying Earthly law at N.Y.U.—since he was busy, I said I’d take her, forgetting I already had a date of my own. So—uh—I thought—especially since she’s a beauty and an interesting personality—”
“Okay, I’ll t-take her,” said Gordon Graham. “Where do I meet you?”
“Just a minute while I look at the time-table . . . We’ll be on the Boonton Branch train, Lackawanna Division, that gets into the K.S.T. at seventeen fifty-two.”
“All right. See you.”
Gordon Graham broke the connection, got up, and looked around vaguely for some clean clothes. Such was the warmth of the late June air that he wouldn’t bother with a blouse; he cared nothing for other people’s ideas of formality. He looked at his long-nosed face in the mirror to see if he needed a second shave and decided against it. Then his mind wandered off among the differential equations describing magmatic vortices, on which he’d been working, and he stood lost in thought for ten minutes without moving a muscle.
Finally he pulled himself out of his trance, sat down, and wrote a few equations lest he forget them. Then he resumed his preparations. It was later than he had thought, so he hurried a bit, as much as he ever hurried. Not that it would do Ivor and his extra-terrestrial girlfriend any great harm to wait a few minutes for him . . .
At last he left the small four-apartment house in Englewood, New Jersey, where he and Ivor shared one of the apartments, to walk to the tube station. On the way to the station he passed the helicab lot and toyed for a moment with the idea of taking one of the cabs. It would set him down on the roof of the Columbus Circle Terminal (initials K.S.T. in the new spelling) in ten minutes. On the other hand the time he’d save would not be worth the extra cost.
On the tube train his mind wandered hazily between his beloved equations and the blind date he’d committed himself to. A Krishnan girl might be beautiful even from the Earthly standard, despite blue-green hair, pointed ears, and feathery smelling-antennae sprouting from between her eyebrows. And she could presumably talk instead of having to communicate by sign language with writhing tentacles like an Ishtarian. Still she would not be a human being; her internal organs . . .
Well, maybe that was just as well. For Gordon Graham had sworn a great oath, by the founders of the science of geophysics, not—repeat not—to fall in love on first sight again, after all the misery it had caused him the last three or four times. It was all very well for the extraverted Ivor to tell him that what he needed was to get married; how could you when all the squids you asked laughed at you?
He got off the train at the K.S.T. In walking through the maze of passages in the terminal he let his mind wander off into some of the more abstruse problems of geophysics. When he came to he was on the escalator going down to the High Speed Line platforms at the lowest level of the station . . .
As the escalator was slowly crawling down two deep decks, Graham saved time by reaching up, seizing a crossbar with a directional sign on it, and swinging his long legs easily from the down escalator to the up one next to it. The feat brought startled stares from the other escalator passengers, especially as the sober-looking Graham did not seem like a young man to put on an impromptu public trapeze act.
He finally found the gate through which passengers issued from trains of the Lackawanna Division of the North American Railroads. His watch showed him that he was just in time to meet the 1752 train of the Boonton division—or “Buunton” as the announcement board said it in reformed spelling. (Graham was always forgetting to sign his checks “Goordon Greiam” and getting in trouble with his bank in consequence.)
The passengers presently streamed out, Ivor among them, almost as tall as Gordon but looking much shorter because he was broader. Ivor Graham, ex-football hero and now local New York guide for the Tilghman Travel Agency (GUIDED TOURS TO ALL PLANETS) introduced his brother to the Krishnan girl.
Jeru-Bhetiru was almost as tall as Gordon Graham—not unnatural, as Krishnans averaged about the stature of the tallest human races. Something to do with lesser surface gravity of that planet. She possessed external organs of smell, that looked something like a pair of blue-green feathers or perhaps like elongated supernumerary eyebrows, rising from above the bridge of her nose. Her hair was a glossy bluish-green and grew in a not-quite-human pattern on her head. Her features bore a slightly flattish Mongoloid look, so that while she would, with other coloration, have made a passably pretty American Caucasoid girl, she would have been simply ravishing as a Chinese or Indonesian. Her skin bore a faintly greenish tinge too, and her large pointed ears stuck up like those of the Little People in children’s picture books. She wore the frontless Minoan-style dress of her native plan
et: an outfit to arrest attention even in that sophisticated city and age, rising primly to a high collar in back but in front bare to the midriff, so that it was patent that the wearer, though oviparous, was still definitely a mammal.
Gordon Graham gulped, reflecting that convergent evolution had certainly outdone itself in producing the Krishnans, so human-looking that it was possible for the two species to enjoy the pleasures of carnal love with each other. (Though of course without issue; the chromosome mechanism of the Krishnans was entirely different from that of Terrans.) The mere thought made Gordon Graham tingle, blush, and clear his throat.
“G-g-glad to know you, Miss Bhetiru,” he said at last.
Ivor corrected him: “If you must say ‘Miss,’ say ‘Miss Jeru.’ They put surnames first like the Chinese. I call her ‘Betty.’ ”
“Glad to know you—uh—Betty,” said Gordon solemnly.
She smiled warmly. “I am glad to know you too. Of course in my language if you wanted to use the familiar form, you would call me Jeru-Bhetiru, but I shall be happy with ‘Betty.’ ”
Ivor explained: “Her old man is Jeré-Lagilé. You know, the Earthly representative of Katai-Jhogorai for all those years. After her tour finishes its New York stay, she’s going to leave it and stay on for a few months to study our Earthly child psychology. Doesn’t look like a snake-pitter, does she?”
Gordon had to admit she didn’t. Despite the oriental look of her Krishnan features, she was all that Ivor had promised and then some.
Ivor continued: “Gordon’s a big-shot scientist on the Gamanovia Project, Betty, as well as an instructor of geophysics at Columbia. He’s really a brilliant guy in spite of that sappy look.”
“What is the Gamanovia Project?” asked Jeru-Bhetiru.
“Oh, don’t you know? It’s that scheme for increasing the land area of the Earth by making some new continents.”
“My ancestors! How do they do that?”
“You tell her, Gordon,” said Ivor.
Gordon Graham cleared his throat. “The fact is, Miss—uh—Betty, that we’ve found how to control currents in the amorphous magmatic substratum—”
“Please!” she said. “I do not know all those big words! Can you not make it more simple?”
Gordon collected himself. “Well, you know that if you go down below the surface on a planet like this for fifty or sixty miles, you’d find yourself in a mass of white-hot lava, which however can’t flow freely like a true liquid because it’s under such terrific pressure. But it will flow slowly, under long-continued stresses, like cold pitch, and these currents cause movements in the crystalline crust that lies on top of this substratum. That’s how we get mountain ranges and oceanic deeps and things. Now, we find that by setting off atomic charges in the substratum at a controlled rate of disintegration, we can control these magmatic currents, as they’re called, so as to cause parts of the ocean bed to rise to the surface, and other parts to sink deeper so as not to flood the existing land surfaces.”
“How do you get the charges down there?”
“By a ‘maggot,’ a kind of mechanical mole, remote-controlled from the surface . . . Say, what’s next on the program, Ivor? Have you folks eaten yet?”
Ivor Graham directed them to the K.S.T. restaurant, while Gordon, now warmed up to fine professorial fettle, went on with his explanation.
Jeru-Bhetiru asked: “Why do they call it ‘Gamanovia’?”
“Because that will be the name of the first new experimental continent. It’s to be raised in the South Atlantic around Ascension Island, and every nation in the World Federation had its own idea of what it should be named. Most of ’em had their pet national heroes in mind; the Indians wanted ‘Nehruvia,’ for instance. Somebody suggested ‘Atlantis,’ but it was objected that in the first place Plato’s imaginary Atlantis was in the North Atlantic, and in the second, if this experiment worked, we’d probably want to raise another continent in the North Atlantic and we’d better save that name for it.
“Brazil wanted to name the new continent either after Vasco da Gama, the first European to navigate those waters, or João da Nova, who discovered Ascension Island a few years later. When the others said ‘Gamia’ and ‘Novia’ would be lousy names for continents, the Brazzies just grinned and said: ‘All right, senhores, we’ll run them both together and call it ‘Gamanovia.’ And being the world’s leading power . . .”
“Here we are,” said Ivor. “Hey, Gordon, don’t you want to wash your hands?”
Gordon Graham looked and saw that he did indeed want to wash his hands—and literally, not as a euphemism. For the steel bar by which he had swung from one escalator to the other had borne a thick coating of dust on its upper surface. He got lost a couple of times before he found a men’s washroom on the next lower story.
As this was Sunday, the room happened to be entirely empty. As Graham was soaping his hands, a smallish dark man came in nervously puffing a cigarette, apparently on a similar errand. But then the man suddenly spoke: “Ain’t you Dr. Gordon Graham?”
“Uh?” said Graham vaguely, startled out of his daydream of the beautiful Bhetiru. “Y-yes—that is, I haven’t got my Ph.D. yet, but I am Gordon Graham.”
“Good. I must spick to you soon. Are you goink places tonight?” The man seemed to have a slight Slavic accent.
“Yes, b-but who are you?”
“My name is Sklar. I will tell you more about myself later.”
“And—uh—what do you want to see me about?”
“About your Gamanovia Project. You’ll have to teck my word that it is important; I can’t go into details now. What time do you get home from work tomorrow?”
“Let’s see, that’s Monday—oh, about fifteen hundred.”
“Good, I will see you there—”
The man broke off and whirled as two other men, much larger than he, came in through the door and stalked swiftly towards the two who already occupied the washroom. One of them had his right hand in his blouse pocket, which bulged as if the man were pointing a gun, inside the pocket, towards the self-styled Sklar. The other faced Graham, placed a large hand on his chest, and gave a sharp push.
Graham sighed. It was always that way. People looking for trouble, deceived by his long soupy look and unaware that boxing had been his undergraduate sport in college, insisted on picking on him, and then he just had to take measures. He took them now: he put away his glasses and followed this act with a lead with his left to the ribs and a long straight right to the man’s right eye.
The man tottered and fell backwards, supine, his head hitting the tiles with a distinct thud.
The other man turned at the sound, and Graham wondered in a flash if he had been so stupid as to provoke the man to shooting him. It really wasn’t worth—
However, Sklar instantly did something that shot a stream of vapor from the ring he wore into the second man’s face, so that the victim began at once to blink, sneeze, cough, and sputter. Then Sklar stepped close to the man. His hand came out of a pocket with a blackjack. Thwuck! went the sap against the man’s skull, and this man, too, swayed and collapsed like a felled Douglas fir.
But now the man Graham had hit was getting up, his still-open left eye glaring furiously. Sklar took a whack at him, too, but the man saw him coming and knocked him aside with a sweep of an arm like the loom of a galley oar. A fist came around and jolted Graham’s jaw, staggering him. For a few seconds they mixed it. Graham, taking advantage of his orangutanian reach, landed a couple more good ones to the face. Then a repeated thud told Graham that Sklar was working on the man’s cranium with his blackjack from behind. And although the man’s skull seemed to be one of more than ordinary thickness, this man at last folded up on the tiles also.
“Now, ain’t this somethink?” said Sklar, staring at the bodies. He quickly bent and searched the men, taking a pistol out of the pocket of one and stowing it in his own. “Help me get them out of here, quick,” he said.
“Huh? What d’you
mean?” said Graham. “Why don’t you call a cop?”
“I am a cop!” said the small man impatiently, whipping out a wallet and flapping it in Graham’s face. Graham got a glimpse of the identification card of Reinhold Sklar, World Federation Constable, Second Grade. (Some sort of Central European, Graham surmised.) Sklar continued: “So I don’t want no city poliss buttink into my case.”
Sklar looked swiftly around, still puffing on the same cigarette he had been smoking when the fight started. In the far corner of the washroom there was a small green door bearing the words KIIP AUT—the kind of door found all over large modern buildings. Everybody walks by them without even wondering whether they conceal broom closets, back stairs, or what. Sklar pushed it and it opened.
“Lucky for us some pipple is laxative about locking doors,” he said. “Take that one’s shoulders, now; they are too big for me to move all by myself. Quick before somebody comes in.”
Graham, a bit bewildered by all this, did as he was told. Between them they lugged both unconscious forms through the small door and out onto an iron platform a little more than a meter square. This platform in turn gave access to a circular iron staircase that extended up and down from it. Upwards it disappeared into a tangle of dimly lit girders, while downwards it ended on the extreme end of one of the loading platforms of the High Speed Line, on the lowest level of the K.S.T. They were definitely backstage, now.
“Down,” said Sklar softly, and they began hauling one of the bodies down the helical stair. When they had dropped the first on the concrete they went back for the second. The platform tapered at the end like the bow of a ship, and a couple of meters back of the stair was a huge square concrete pillar that cut off the view of the rest of the platform. They stood in shadow and in near silence, except for the occasional distant rumble of a train on one of the higher levels.
Graham whispered: “What is all this about? Who are these gloops? And what’s it got to do with me?”
“Tell you tomorrow,” snapped Sklar, peering around the right side of the pillar. Below them gleamed the single ground rail of the High Speed Line, twice the size of a normal railroad rail, while the overhead rail, which kept the cars upright, glimmered above. A few meters from where they stood, on the other side of the pillar, the smooth nose of a High Speed articulated car, tapering to a rounded point like that of an artillery shell, reflected the lights of the station. Somewhere under the rounded body the air compressor chugged faintly.
The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens Page 20