Journey Into Space

by Charles Chilton

  We found our ‘lodging’ without difficulty and entered the sphere by the usual circular door. Inside were four couches, a table with what appeared to be food on it, and a spherical televiewer by the wall. Otherwise the place was bare. Mitch walked over the table and picked up one of the platters. “Do you think this is good to eat?” he asked.

  “Only one way to find out.” Breaking a piece off, I put it in my mouth.

  “Well, what’s it like, Doc?” asked Jet.

  “Not bad,” I told. “Very sweet, rather like honey but with the texture of bread.”

  “And I suppose these things are for us to sleep on?” said Lemmy, going over to one of the beds and pressing it with his fingers.

  “What else?” asked Mitch.

  “What do we do for bedcovers?” went on Lemmy.

  “Perhaps they don’t expect us to undress. The Voice didn’t seem to be wearing any clothes.”

  “Eh? What about all that shell stuff--that armour-plating--wasn’t that clothes?”

  “I doubt it,” I told him.

  “Well, I don’t know about you,” said Mitch, “but I’m hungry. I’m going to risk eating some of this stuff and then get me some sleep, bedclothes or no.”

  We’d soon consumed every piece of food in sight, including the sweet, rather sticky liquid that we found in a large container placed in the middle of the table. After we’d eaten, Mitch moved to one of the beds and lay down on it.

  “How’s it feel, Mitch?” Jet asked.

  “Oh, quite comfortable,” he yawned. “I feel so tired I could sleep on a clothes line.”

  “Are you warm?” asked Jet. “Hey, Mitch--.” But he was sound asleep.

  “Here,” said Lemmy, “I suppose it is just sleep. That couch couldn’t be some kind of trap, could it?”

  “How could it?” asked Jet.

  “Well, why not? You lie on it and--whoops, you’re off, lost to the world. Then when all four of us are laid out, in come them gremlins or whatever they are and we’ve had it.” Jet walked over to Mitch and shook him.

  “Huh? What’s the matter ?” asked the Australian.

  “Are you all right, Mitch?” asked Jet.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Well, we thought that. . .” He didn’t finish, for Mitch had turned over and was fast asleep again.

  “It’s as though those beds made you sleep whether you want to or not,” said Lemmy.

  “But he woke very easily for Mitch,” said Jet; “almost as soon as I touched him.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” I said. “‘It seems the whole make-up of these people is based on gentleness and kindness.”

  “But how could anybody so ugly be so kind and considerate?” asked Lemmy.

  “For the same reasons as anything so beautiful as a--a cat can be so cruel.”

  “That makes a kind of sense, Doc,” admitted Lemmy.

  “And sleeping makes sense, too,” said Jet, lying down as he spoke. “I think you’d better turn in as well, both of you.”

  “Good night, Lemmy,” I said as I stretched out on the third couch.

  “What do you mean, ‘good night’?” he asked. “It’s broad daylight out there.”

  “I expect it always is,” I told him. “But that won’t stop me from sleeping.”

  I woke to find the bed hard, uncomfortable and prickly. I was glad to climb out of it. Mitch and Jet were already up and were standing over Lemmy, smiling as they watched him writhing.

  “What’s up, Lemmy?” said Jet. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “No, I can’t. This bed’s so darned uncomfortable,” he replied. “It was fine when I first got in, but now it feels like a plank--a bare plank with splinters in it.”

  “That’s just how mine was,” said Jet, “and Mitch’s.”

  “What’s that human mandrill trying to do--make a monkey out of us?”

  ‘Good morning,” said the Voice. “I trust you slept well.”

  “I would have done if the bed had stayed as comfortable as when I first got in it.”

  “But it did.” “Eh?” said Lemmy.

  “You slept for hours. The beds don’t get uncomfortable until you’ve had your full sleep.”

  “You mean they are a sort of sleeping pill and alarm clock combined?”

  “What an ingenious idea!” said Jet.

  We had awoken with a remarkable feeling of freshness, for our long sleep had done all of us the world of good. The tired, strained look had left Jet’s face, Mitch was sweeter-tempered and Lemmy less pessimistic. A bath or shower would have made my morning complete, but either the Time Travellers thought we had no need of such twentieth-century luxuries or they were not acquainted with aquatic methods of cleanliness. But they had not forgotten our breakfast. We sat down at the table and cheerfully ate a hearty, if somewhat monotonous, meal. We had hardly finished when the Voice called us again.

  It wanted information about our ship, Luna--how it worked, what the motive power was, its maximum speed and all kinds of technical details which only Mitch could give. The enquiry went on for nearly an hour. Between them Jet and Mitch explained why it would be impossible for us to take off from the Earth and return to the Moon under our own power, and why it was impossible for us to take off at all while the ship remained in a horizontal position. Finally the Voice said: “Now we are in possession of the facts, it is easy for us to see how the accident happened.”

  “Accident?” asked Jet. “What accident?”

  “The one that brought you to your present position. It was never intended. But I think perhaps now we can get you off the Earth again, and back into space.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Jet, his relief manifest in his voice.

  “Could you leave in a few hours if your ship were ready?” “Certainly,” said Jet eagerly, overwhelmed, as we all were, at the prospect of going home.

  “Then return to your ship,” said the Voice, “and take off in the usual way. Climb as high from the surface of the Earth as your motor will allow, and leave the rest to us.”

  “I hope,” said Jet, “that you don’t intend to return us to the Moon. It will take about all the fuel we have to effect a take-off. Once we landed on the Moon, we would never get off again.”

  “We do not intend to take you back to the Moon.”

  “You’ll leave us coasting towards the Earth, then?”

  “No.”

  Jet looked a little puzzled. “Then where do you intend to take us?” he asked.

  “To the planet you call Venus.”

  “To Venus?” Jet repeated. “Why to Venus?”

  “Because that is where we are going.”

  The piece of honey bread I was chewing turned sour in my mouth. There was a hollow, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mitch, who’d been taking a drink from a shiny metal container, let the cup fall to the table from where, after spilling its pale-yellow liquid, it rolled with a clatter to the floor. Lemmy gulped. Jet struggled to remain calm, and it was some time before he spoke. “You heard that, gentlemen?” he said quietly.

  “I told you this was a trap,” said Lemmy. “All this feeding us, these beds and everything--it wasn’t kindness at all. It was just a trick to get us here and make us prisoner.”

  “But why to Venus?” asked Jet, almost to himself. “We’d die as soon as we set foot on the place.”

  “Why should you?” the Voice enquired. “You managed to exist on the Moon, and Venus is not nearly so hostile.”

  “But I don’t want to go to Venus,” said Lemmy. “I want to go home--to Earth.”

  “But you are on Earth.”

  “Back in our own time, I mean; in the twentieth century where we came from.”

  “That we can’t allow.”

  “Why not?” asked Jet.

  “If we take you back you will build other space ships and make further trips to the Moon and beyond.”

  “Of course,” said Mitch. He could not suppress the n
ote of fanaticism in his voice. “That’s the reason why we started out on this trip in the first place. Man has a new frontier to conquer, the frontier of space. And nothing will stop him.”

  “Not even if every space ship that left Earth failed to return?”

  “Oh, so that’s your little game, is it?” said Lemmy. “You’re going to lie up there on the Moon, waiting for ships to come out from Earth so that you can knock ‘em from there into the middle of next week.”

  “How else can we prevent Man conquering space?”

  “Why should you wish to?” asked Jet. “You’ve conquered it yourself, haven’t you?”

  “We had to leave our planet--we had no choice.”

  “I don’t see that that makes any difference,” argued Mitch. “There’s no universal law to say that beings from one part of the Universe should travel it at will while those of another should not.”

  “Our reasons are sound enough,” said the Voice. “Perhaps, if you care to watch the televiewer globe, I can convince you.”

  We all turned towards the pedestal where it stood near the curving wall. Jet got up from his seat and walked round the table towards the glowing sphere, as did the rest of us.

  “These,” said the Voice, “are the forest creatures.”

  The picture was clear enough. It showed a group of men, if you could call them that; for they were men from a long-forgotten age, men at their wildest and most primitive. “Pre-historic men--our an--ancestors!” I gasped.

  There were about ten of them, including women and children.

  So far as I could tell, they were neanderthaloids. Their skins were of a dark hue, whether naturally or from the want of a wash I couldn’t say. Their hair was auburn, their noses flat and their eyebrows beetling. From their wide mouths, which frequently opened in a snarl, long canine teeth protruded. Their feet were broad and large and, as they walked, their arms swung like a chimpanzee’s. Their bodies, as well as their heads, were covered with hair, thick and matted on the chest and thighs. The men had long ragged beards and some of the women held children to their breasts. They all carried some kind of weapon, either a long, sharpened stick, a branch of a tree shaped as a club, or merely heavy stones which they picked up from the ground and used as missiles. They were all stark naked and walked with a stoop.

  “When we first arrived here,” the Voice continued, “thousands of years ago, there were only a few of these animals. But they have steadily multiplied and emerged as creatures with intelligence. They live in small communities and have learned to make fire. They have an insatiable desire to destroy us and all that belongs to us.”

  “Then why don’t you do the same to them?” asked Jet.

  “We can do many things, but we cannot harm any living creature.”

  “Well, that’s a comfort,” Lemmy said to me quietly. “But won’t you even kill for food?” asked Jet.

  “There is no need to kill to live.”

  “But life is like that,” argued Jet. “One animal kills another so that it may survive and that, in its turn, is killed by another. And so on.”

  “So we found when we first arrived on Earth; it was something new to us. But these creatures that you see have a far higher intelligence than any other animal and yet behave little differently. There is an incredible selfishness in their nature. They fight savagely for food and mates--even kill each other. They would kill you as soon as look at you.”

  “But they won’t come looking for us down here, will they?” asked Lemmy.

  “No. They seldom leave the forest.”

  “Then we’ve got nothing to be scared of, so long as we stay here.”

  “But you can’t.”

  “Why not?” asked Jet.

  “I’ve already told you. The last of us are about to leave, and we cannot protect you when we are gone. Already the forest creatures had begun to get curious about you. That is why we brought you here--where you can remain in safety until we can remove you to Venus to spend the remainder of your days in peace and comfort.”

  “That’s what you say,” put in Lemmy, “but how do we know what you might get up to when you get us there?”

  “You don’t have to come. You can remain here if you wish.”

  “With those gorillas, you mean?” said Lemmy. “And you say you’ve no wish to harm us.”

  “It would not be us that harmed you; it would be the forest creatures, your own ancestors.”

  “Ah! That’s the point, isn’t it?” said Jet. “You think that because we’re descended from those--those cave men, we’re still like them. That’s the true reason you won’t attempt to get us back to our own time.”

  “Can you blame us? We have seen the forces that drive them, their uncontrollable desire to destroy anything they do not understand. Can you imagine what such creatures would do if let loose on a peaceful planet where violence was unknown?”

  “Yes, I can,” said Mitch, “but twentieth-century man is not like that. We are quite different, you can see that for yourself.”

  “Physically, yes, but it takes a long time for such things to be driven out of a being’s nature--a long, long time, longer than your kind has inhabited this planet.”

  “But in comparison with the age of the Earth,” I said, “Man has hardly existed any time at all.”

  “You are merely proving my argument.”

  “But even in that time we have learned a lot,” said Jet. “We’ve progressed.”

  “You mean you don’t kill each other anymore? You no longer destroy the things that can give you life and comfort, as the forest men burn our crops which they could eat if they knew how? You are certain that the instinct does not remain in some other form?”

  Jet was silent. “Look,” he said at length, “we’re not perfect. I don’t know how long your kind has been alive, probably many thousand times longer than Man. You’ve had time to conquer your primitive desires, suppress them. You have endless generations of experience behind you. Give us the time and we’ll be like you. We’ll stamp out the undesirable part of our natures; but you must give us the time.”

  “I realise that,” said the Voice. “But meanwhile are you to be allowed to expand into the realms of space; to destroy others, perhaps? To conquer space before you have even conquered yourselves?”

  “You can’t help destruction of some kind,” said Mitch. “You can’t plant a field without you clear the forest first. You can’t drive a steam engine without you dig out the coal or pump out the oil from the bowels of the Earth.”

  “Oh yes, you can,” said the Voice. “There is power all around you; forces for all to use, with no digging and no pumping, no waste.”

  “We haven’t learned to harness that power yet,” said Jet. “We don’t even know what it is.”

  “Then perhaps you will leave your exploration of space until you do.”

  “But don’t you see,” Jet was emphatic, “that is where you can help us.”

  “How?”

  “By telling us your secrets.”

  “Would you explain the workings of your ship and all its equipment to the forest creatures?”

  “What would be the point?” asked Jet. “It would be like trying to explain the quantum theory to a child.”

  “Exactly.”

  But Jet was not to be defeated. “At least,” he said, “you could make a start--with simple things. We are not quite as primitive as those ape men, even by comparison with you.”

  “A child cannot be taught to run before it can walk, and you have hardly emerged from the crawling stage.”

  “You don’t think much of us, one way and another, do you?” asked Lemmy.

  “We think as much of you as we do of any other living creature anywhere in the Universe. We have no wish to harm you.”

  “But if you leave us here,” said Lemmy, “it amounts to the same thing.”

  “For our own safety, for the safety of our generations to come, it would be better to leave you here--to prevent your ever going
out into space again.”

  “Then you don’t know us as well as you think you do. Our deaths would make no difference. Man will conquer space; and neither you nor anybody else will stop him.”

  There was no reply to Jet's last remark. We stood in silence and watched the cave men on the screen. Some of them were now sitting on the ground. Two were fighting; tearing at each other's throats with their fingernails. Others gathered round them, snarling and growling as though they, too, were likely to join in the fight at any moment. Then the picture faded and the globe became opaque once more.

  Jet called the Voice two or three times but got no reply. So, one by one, we wandered back to the table and disconsolately sat down. "Well," said Jet, "what do you think they'll do now?"

  "Take us to Venus, of course," said Mitch. "What else? How can we prevent them?"

  "We don't have to take off," I said.

  "I suppose they could find a way of making us if they wanted to," said Lemmy. "I wouldn't put it past them."

  I wasn't of Lemmy's opinion. "I don't think they would ever make us do anything against our will," I told him. "The worst that could happen would be for us to have to leave this city and make our own way through this hostile, pre-historic world until death overtook us all."

  "Blimey," said Lemmy, half smiling, "we wouldn't half put some of those archaeologists in a flutter if they found our skeletons in the same grave as one of those gorillas."

  "Well," said Jet, "we'd better decide what we want to do. If they insist on taking us to Venus and no other place, are we to accept or not?"

  "No," I said decisively. "At least we know we can breathe the air here. And, with luck, we may keep ourselves alive for some years yet. On Venus we might not live five minutes."

  Mitch disagreed flatly. "If it comes to a final choice," he said, "I think I would go to Venus."

  "Good heavens, Mitch," said Jet. "Why?"

  "For the same reason as I went to the Moon. If I'm never going back to my own time anyway, I might as well see as much of the Universe as I can before I die."

  And so began a lengthy discussion--hours of argument broken by long silences or walks outside to breathe the deeply-scented, invigorating air.