Lunar Vengeance: A Collection of Science Fiction Stories

by Fearn, John Russell

  Dodd, though a scientist, firmly believed in the inaccessibility of Nature’s inner secrets, and had neither vision nor tolerance. He was too content to accept science for what it was rather than for what it might become. In that very fact lay the seed of disaster. The camp of Science, divided against itself, began to show signs of decay.

  Time and again the Arbiter was called in, and every time the verdict went to Horley Dodd and his party. Baffled, sickened by the obvious breakdown in the scheme for universal peace, President Selby Doyle’s grip on things commenced to weaken. Already worn out with the cares of office, to which had been added crushing disappointment, the illness which preceded his demise was brief.

  Officials were present round his death bed—but officials were all they were, men who had served him because it had been their duty to serve. To the dying President there was only one face which represented loyalty and friendship, and it belonged to Carfax.

  “Carfax, you must be President,” Doyle whispered. “As—as it is my final wish, you will be chosen. All around this bed are the men and women who will elect you. I have their promise. I think that I have—have been too lenient, but no such emotions will trouble you, Carfax. You are younger. You are an expert scientist. You must defeat this Arbiter, my friend. Find out why it has turned traitor! You promise?”

  “I promise,” Carfax answered. President Doyle relaxed and smiled. It was a smile that remained fixed. The President of the Earth was dead.

  An hour later the assembled scientists, all of them leaders on the side of the Strugglers, filed into the main office to face their new President. They found Carfax at the great desk, coldly silent. He waited until the group was fully assembled.

  “Gentlemen, for seven years now we have been chained hand and foot by an invention of our own making—a metal dictator—and it has betrayed us. We don’t know why, yet—but we do know that unless we defy this Arbiter, or find forces which can destroy it, we are a doomed people.”

  Gascoyne shook his head. “We cannot destroy it—at least not in the light of present scientific knowledge,” he said seriously. “We made the thing of a metal whose atoms interlock, remember. It is sealed forever. We made it foolproof—and to what end?”

  “It is in our own hands to determine the end,” President Carfax retorted. “Unless we act, we’re finished. It is the very law of the Universe that there must be progress. Every day now brings us up against new difficulties. Sources of power are running low. New sources, intended for us by Nature, are barred because the brains that would develop them are prevented by this twelve-brained monstrosity. I tell you we must defeat it!”

  Assured that he might be able to succeed, President Carfax went to work to prove his words. The Strugglers began anew the experiments which had been truncated by the death of Grenson.

  They worked to within an ace of solving the secret of safe atomic power. Carfax himself got far enough to extract a terrific amount of energy from a cube of copper. From incredibly small pieces of highly conductive metal he built up a model power plant which, on a giant scale, would replace the already sadly worn electric equipment from which the cities derived their light and power.

  The other scientists explored different realms. Some reasoned out new methods of synthesis by which the fast waning supplies of oil and coal could be replaced. Another was convinced that he had transmutation of metals in his grip, with which the cities could be repaired as time went on. Yet another saw his chance of harnessing the waste energy of the sun.

  By degrees, under Carfax’s fine leadership, the determined scientists began to lay plans for the foundation of real Utopia.

  Then the Arbiter struck! In a public speech it declared that the discoveries claimed, by President Vincent Carfax and his colleagues were nothing better than fancy. The Arbiter took sides with the Opposers and launched a small but savagely effective massacre against the Strugglers. In three days of desperate skirmish and slaughter Carfax and his followers were wiped out. Horley Dodd leader of the Opposers, was killed too. Not that it signified much. The Opposers were now in complete control, backed always by the impartial Arbiter.

  Languid with victory, the Opposers lazily repaired the damage and then sat back to enjoy the comforts which Vincent Carfax had sworn were coming to an end. Apathy set in, born of lack of anything to accomplish. Even the Arbiter had nothing left to judge. The final vanquishment had shown to the Opposers that progress was a form of disease and entirely unnecessary. Better to relax and enjoy the fruits of labour. The year 2087 passed away and was followed by a gap of somnolent, drifting years until 3000. Nothing had been accomplished, nothing done. Life was one grand bliss of effortless satisfaction. The pioneers were lost in the mists of memory. Science, as an art, had ceased to be.

  3100——3150—and the Arbiter was still in faultless condition. Indeed it had been made indestructible. Men and women died, children were born in limited numbers, grew up, each one knowing less of science than those before them. Astronomy, physics, mathematics? They were things the ancients had studied, said the history records. Somewhere in the smeared archives was the name of Selby Doyle. Then in 3020 came the first warnings of the trouble Carfax had foreseen. The weather controlling machinery broke down, its central bearings worn out from continued inattention. In consequence the weather suddenly reverted to its former unreliable state and deluged whole continents of synthetic crops, destroyed a world’s food supply for a year.

  Hurricanes tore across the world. Cities which were slowly eroding through continued lack of repair eroded still more. That grey metal, so shiny at first, was cracking now, flaking under the continued onslaught of the elements.

  A nervous flurry passed through the people. For the first time they were really alarmed. They rushed to the weather controlling station but could only stare helplessly at silent, useless machinery. Knowledge was dead.

  This was not all. Trouble came thick and fast. With the failure of the crops, animals began to die off. The machines that tended them only functioned so long as they received—from still other machines—steady supplies of crops, specially developed for cattle consumption. When the supply stopped the machines stopped too, and nobody knew what to do about it.

  The seed of disaster flourished with terrific speed, burst the foundations of the formerly calm cities and upset the tranquillity of the pleasure-softened people. The collapse of the weather machinery presaged the overture to the end. Blinding cataracts of rain seeped through corroded roofs, the water short-circuiting the vital power and light machinery, already at breaking point through wear and tear.

  Light and power failed in each city simultaneously. Famine reared over a disturbed, turmoiled world girt about with scurrying clouds. In desperation the people turned to the Arbiter, their leader.

  But the Arbiter did nothing! It ignored the wild pleas hurled at it, marched out of the insecure laboratory that was its home and departed into the storm-lashed country. In the hour of need it had deserted them.

  Panic seized the people at the realization. They fled from cities, whether they knew not, floundered in a mad exodus seeking food that was not there, cursing aloud to the heavens because synthesis had destroyed all natural growth and cultivation. Specialization had been proved a tragedy. Escape from a world which was too perfect became an obsession.

  Gradually, inevitably, it was forced upon the people in those hours of mad struggle and desperation that they were face to face with certain extinction. 3025. Panic and struggle had gone. A strange calm was on the world. Cities, crumbled through disuse, ravaged by tempest and flood, poked blind, inquisitive spires to cleared skies. The sun crossed a sky which was, in the main, peaceful again. Climate had adjusted back to its normal vagaries.

  But the soft winds of spring, the hot sun of summer, the cool chill of the fall, and the heavy snows of winter fell on bones that were scattered, white and forgotten, across Earth’s face. Alone in this world of emptiness, where natural grass and trees were trying once more to struggle
through, there moved a cumbersome affair of metal, still cold and impartial, inhuman and relentless. It climbed mountains, it prowled plains, it searched the ruins of cities, it brooded alone. The Arbiter.

  3025 A.D. 3075 A.D. Then the aliens came. They were strange, birdlike creatures, masters of space travel, Lords of their own peculiar science. They came not as conquerors but with the intention of making friends with the third-world people. Their amazement was complete when they could not find a soul alive.

  Then eventually they found the Arbiter. With their superior science they analysed it, probed its deepest secrets, broke open the supposedly impregnable sheathing by four-dimensional tools.

  The aliens remained on Earth for several days while the leading scientist, Cor Santu, pondered over the curious mystery of a lost race. From studying the dissembled Arbiter and the still remaining records of human events, transcribed by the Leader of Languages, he built up an explanation of the problem.

  “Poor earthly scientists!” was his final comment. “Brilliant men indeed—but they forgot one thing. If a world or people is to survive it must have progress, even as we have found in our own experience. Wars are indeed evil and should be prevented. But dictators are worse. Right alone can prevail in the end.

  “Selby Doyle and Vincent Carfax did not trust to Right, to a Universal mind control for guidance. No, they invented a machine of twelve mechanical brains to bring them peace. Such a device could not solve the problem. They forgot that a brain, in progressing, must expand. We have seen that, in any case, these Earth beings only used a portion of their full brain capacity. That, later, would have developed. But in the machine they strangled it. Carfax and the surgeon Gascoyne made these mechanical brains fixed to what was, at that time, the present! To the Arbiter it was always the present! Being rigid metal the imprisoned brains could not expand, could not go a step beyond the day of their creation. That is why the Arbiter destroyed all things that suggested progress, and also because it feared any sign of progress would bring its power to an end. It was just another dictator.

  “Such metal bound brains, living in a past world, could not visualize anything progressive. Conservationism gone mad! From the instant the brains were moulded of metal they deteriorated. And having no human sentiment they destroyed without question. So when the great catastrophe came the Arbiter was powerless—as powerless as all the others who had not kept pace with progress. Nature must progress, or perish. That is evolution.”

  Thereon Cor Santu ended his observations. But when his fleet of spaceships soared through the sunny sky towards fresh worlds of exploration, there was left behind a smashed, irreparable mass of melted cogs, wires, and wheels. It was a rusting monument to a race that had died—a race that had fallen prey to laziness and surrendered its freedom to the ruthless whims of a machine.

  THE MENTAL GANGSTER

  Zero hour. Blackie Melrose had been banking on it for three months, either plotting silently in his cell or else giving signals to his fellow convicts in the mineral-sorting room. Four of them were ready to make the break any minute now—

  Blackie’s cold eyes scowled at the electric clock on the metal wall as the second-hand crept round. His fingers played with the minerals on the conveyor-belt. His gaze shifted to his fellow-conspirators and from their appointed positions they responded with taut nods. All four of them were the toughest bunch that had ever decided to try and escape the prison walls of this asteroid penitentiary way out beyond Pluto— Lonely. Damned.

  Sixtieth second!

  “Right!” Blackie snapped; then a whirlwind of action exploded into the fear-quiet silence.

  The guards up on their balcony were taken by surprise: that was the crux of the thing. Doors opened for conveyor trucks remained open, mysteriously jammed. Four men slammed and hammered their way to them. Knives glittered, ray-guns flashed, tables and small machines were overturned.

  Blackie, six feet of iron-hard muscle, used only his fists—but with devastating effect. The two guards who jumped to seize him fell away, one slugged on the top of the head and the other with a broken jaw.

  Sirens started to scream as the four pelted down the corridor outside. ‘Knife’ Halligan whipped out his trusty blade and drove it mercilessly to the heart of the solitary sentry at the external valve. He dropped.

  “Here!” ‘Knife’ panted, whisking suits from a concealed trap in the metal wall. “Spacesuits. We’ll make it. Those guards are all messed up in the machine-room— You locked the doors on them, Pen?”

  Pen Anderson nodded quick confirmation.

  The four struggled into their suits and slammed the visor-helmets in position. Then, Blackie leading, they opened the valve and emerged onto the starlit plain outside. There, as arranged, a spaceship was waiting for them

  At top speed they raced to it, blundering through the air-lock even as the hail of ray-gun charges seared after them, to flash back harmlessly from the slammed barrier. The ship took off immediately, leaving the barren little asteroid far below—climbing slowly but inevitably towards the stars.

  Blackie took off his spacesuit slowly, then slid big hands comfortably down his overalled thighs.

  “Well, boys, we made it!” His voice was hoarse with satisfaction. “All the sweat an’ plannin’ wasn’t for nothin’, was it? Y’can always trust Blackie to get you in the clear—” He rubbed his close-cropped black head, then lighted a half cigarette and relaxed in a wall chair.

  “And the screws can never get us now,” he finished. “It’s space—and freedom.”

  ‘Knife’ Halligan gave a slow nod, then he switched his ratty eyes to the man at the control board.

  “You did a nice job, Conroy,” he said.

  “So I think.”

  Conroy slipped the automatic pilot in position and turned to face the quartet. The men looked at each other. Conroy was a go-between—not the first time had he assisted in a get-away with a pirated ship—but it was the first time he had looked so white about the gills about it. He had a dead, codfish-grey face and his eyes stared with the murky brazenness of smeared glass.

  “What’s the matter with you, Conroy?” ‘Rays’ Walford demanded sharply. “Been takin’ a shot of dope or something?”

  Conroy seemed surprised. “Mebby it’s space-strain. I’ll fix up something for you to eat.”

  He went out to the provision department and the four men looked at each other again. ‘Rays’ Walford, best mineral frisker this side of Pluto, rubbed his pointed jaw thoughtfully.

  “Say, Blackie, he’s acting queer, isn’t he? Notice the way he talks? Just like as if he’s had himself eddicated since we last saw him.”

  “Why the hell not?” Blackie demanded. “We’ve been in the pen for five years, don’t forget. Anybody can polish up their A.B.C. in that time. Always was keen on books was Conroy.”

  “Uh-huh, I suppose so—but it’s still queer. He talks nearly as high-hat as Pen here.”

  Pen Anderson—round, greasy, and as slimy as the blackmailing racket by which he had lived before the law caught up on him, gave a shrug.

  “Some acquire it: others have it naturally. I’m the latter, of course. The pity is that I have to associate with lice like you—” He regarded his fingernails pensively.

  Nobody said anything, they were accustomed to Pen’s highbrow methods. Then after a while Conroy came back, still with that dead look on his face. He put on the meal, seeming oblivious to the eyes fixed on him as the four started to eat hungrily.

  “All set for the Earth trip?” Blackie asked presently.

  “Certainly. That’s what you paid me for, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m just asking you because I want to get the thing straight. How soon do you think you can get us there?”

  “Barring accidents, about three weeks.”

  “Accidents!” ‘Knife’ Halligan looked up, jaws tight. “What accidents?”

  “Space,” Conroy shrugged, “is full of potential accidents.”

  At a scowl from Bl
ackie, ‘Knife’s’ truculence subsided, but he muttered a warning just the same. “Be too bad for you, Conroy, if you queer the set-up, that’s all!”

  “I agree,” murmured Pen. “It is essential I reach Earth as soon as possible. I have a certain matter to attend to.”

  “More graft and corruption, eh?” Blackie grinned. “That’s what I like about you, Pen—you turn that handwriting and phony polish of yours to good account.”

  “As for me,” ‘Rays’ Walford commented, “I’ve certain rocks to get dumped.” He patted his belt significantly. “I packed enough away to put me on velvet for the rest of my life once we reach Earth—”

  He broke off suddenly and looked up as, surprisingly enough, the ship’s distress signal suddenly flashed. It was actuated by something cutting across the photoelectric beam from the prow, thereby giving instant warning of anything ahead. Immediately Conroy moved to the observation port.

  “A spaceship! A small one!” He gave a frown. “That’s odd! Right off the usual lane, too.”

  “Dodge it,” Blackie ordered, coming up. “Dodge it, I tell you. We’re not answering any distress calls this trip. Understand?”

  “Frankly,” Conroy said, looking about him with that stare which went through things, “I don’t understand. The code of space has to be obeyed. You’re safe—all of you. You’re not in convicts’ clothes: only overalls. And this isn’t a law ship. I’ve got to stop.”

  “You do,” ‘Knife’ Halligan whispered, blade glittering under his clenched fist, “and I’ll pin you to the damned switchboard—”

  “Shut up!” Blackie snapped, wheeling on him. “Come to think of it, Conroy’s mebbe right. Going past would create suspicion. Stop, and we’ll be all right. Anyway, we’re armed. All right, match speeds.”

  They all waited tensely, faces sweating a little as Conroy slowed the machine down with a forward-jet burst. Airlock interchange began. At last the control room door opened and a figure with helmet tipped back on steel-plated shoulders. It was a girl, much peroxided about the hair, much painted, sardonic in expression.