"For heaven's sakel" cried Brenda. "Can't we keep this conversation on a quiet, friendly basis?"
"Take it easy, Orrin," added Criddle. "I don't think Mr. Darragh wants to be offensive."
"Doesn't he?" Lyle half-crooned. "Well, he is." He swung around and looked at Criddle. "You aren't very cooperative, Sam."
"I just suggested..."
"I don't have to listen to your suggestions, at least," interrupted Lyle. "Why don't you just go away Sam?"
"Why . . ." began the older man.
"That's an order, Sam. From the chairman.''
Criddle got up, frowned, twisted his lips, and walked out.
"This is my house, Orrin," said Brenda, also on her feet. I don't see why you have to be unpleasant in it."
"Unpleasant," he said after her, and let his eyes creep around to Darragh. "This man from nowhere is more pleasant I take it." He made an airy gesture. "Maybe I ought to go, too, and leave the pair of you to whatever you find so pleasant about each other."
He stepped to the table and picked up Darragh's knife.
"That's mine," said Darragh.
"It was yours," Lyle told him, in a tone of mocking correction. "I'm confiscating it. All weapons stay in a central depository."
He started for the door, but Darragh made two long strides and barred his way. "I said, that's my knife, Lyle."
"You insist on that point?" Lyle shifted the knife in his hand, holding it daggerwise. "I've confiscated it, I told you."
Darragh's long arm shot out and seized the chair in which Criddle had been sitting. He swung it above his head like a club. .
"That's my knife," he said for the third time. "Put it back."
Lyle's eyes seemed to spring out of his head, and his face turned livid white with fury. Then he relaxed, grinned nastily, and tossed the knife back on the table. "We'll discuss the point later," he said. "May I go now?"
"You certainly may go," Brenda said, before Darragh could speak.
Lyle walked jauntily past Darragh and opened the door. He paused on the threshold. "I'll have to confer with another colleague of mine," he said. "Then I'll come back, Darragh. I may have another rebuttal to your argument."
He was gone.
Darragh set down the chair and looked apologetically at Brenda. "I'm sorry," he said honestly. "I don't know what I said or did to make him act like that. I haven't even gone into any notion of how we might get out of here."
"Orrin just likes to have his own way," she said. "He's always like that. Now I've offended him, too."
"You and he are friends?"
"He wants to marry me," she told him.
Darragh stared at her, then suddenly burst out laughing.
"Marry you?" he cried. "That ruffled-up little parrot wants to marry you?"
She looked at him wide-eyed.
"You seem to think the idea of marrying me is ridiculous," she said angrily.
He stopped laughing, and slowly shook his head. "No—the idea of marrying you is by no means ridiculous."
He made another of his long strides, put both his arms around Brenda Thompson, and kissed her thoroughly on her red mouth.
CHAPTER IX
Brenda Thompson was shocked, he knew as he held her close. His arms clamped a body as rigid and motionless as a statue. Then she strove with frantic strength to free herself.
"What's going on here?" she gasped against his cheek.
"You know what's going on here," he replied, and kissed her again.
"Now, stop." She had worked her hands up against his robe-wrapped chest, and she shoved strainingly against him, throwing her head far back to keep it free.
"After all. . ." she stammered. "I... nobody ever . .”
"Nobody ever grabbed you and kissed you before?" he finished for her. "Well, it's high time."
"Let go!"
"Not a chance, Brenda. If Orrin Lyle wants to marry you, that's just one more way I'm going to frustrate him."
He pulled her against him, and suddenly he did not have to hold her there. She was close to him, her whole body and face, and her arms were up around his neck.
He kissed her, and this time she kissed him back, as strongly as he, for a long heart-scrambling moment.
"Oh, this is crazy," she found time to mumble.
"It's sane," he protested, and let go of her at last.
She still stood against him, and she was smiling up at him, her face so close to his that it looked out of focus.
"After all," she said again. "You . . ."
He was reaching for her, but suddenly moved away, his eyes toward that panel in the rear wall.
"Mark!" Her quick hand caught the sleeve of his robe. "Is anything wrong?"
"Something's very wrong, Brenda. Look yonder. One of those snooping Cold Creatures. I wish I could get close enough to make it hot for him."
She, too, looked and saw. She laughed.
"They don't count, Mark; they don't understand what we're doing." She made as though to put her arms around him, then paused. After a moment she, too, drew back.
"You know what I mean about hating to be watched," he guessed. "I know," she agreed. Her eyes shone with quick fierceness as she gazed at the gross lounger beyond the pane. "What shall we do?”
"Sit down."
They did so, side by side on the sofa.
"Mark," she said pleadingly, "are you really going to get us out of here? Me—and the others?"
"Yes, I am. I'll even get Orrin Lyle out, if he's in a mood to let me. Since we're being gawked at by the visitor at the zoo, let's just talk. You mentioned those ray-weapons, said you knew something about them. All right, tell me what you know."
She clasped her hands in her lap. "Ill do my best, Mark. There are two rays." "Yes. White and green."
"The white one's explosive, and the green one's a power ray. They're both some sort of electrical achievement. You know about electricity, you said."
"Electricity? But I didn't tingle or feel shocked when they rayed me with the green one," remembered Darragh.
"No, because it didn't vibrate you. It..."
"It shoved me."
"That's right," she nodded. "You see, that green ray controls any material body it involves. Anything from dust particles in the air up to—well, up to the heavy roof of this shelter dome."
Darragh glanced upward. "A ray holds up this heavy roof!"
"It's true. Do you think that even the Cold Creatures could find or make a material in quantity and strength to build a solid structure as high as this city or theirs? It's impossible, even for their science."
He smiled at her, and rumpled his black hair. She laughed. "You look like a boy having trouble with his lessons."
"That's what I am, in a way. New ideas are always hard to take aboard. With me, anyway."
"With everybody," said Brenda. "Now, here's what we've rationalized about this structure, and probably those others you say are everywhere. The lower curves and tiers of the dome are supported by concrete and metal braces. But that's good for only a certain height, or the total weight would crush everything. Where we are now—in the center, with the tube rising up, up there maybe two miles above us—the upper weights are held in place by a special formation or pattern of green rays."
"Pointing upward," supplied Darragh.
"They act as girders, shining up frtim a ring of generators set around this shaft where our cottages and we are penned up.”
"I've been out there," said Darragh. "I saw something else. There was a sort of moat of water, that didn't freeze. Some sort of -liquid, at least, colorless and transparent like water, flowing along although the temperature must have been away down below zero."
"I’ll tell you about that liquid later. I'll finish now about the green ray. You understand the basic principle, Mark?"
"Only that you say it controls any physical substance that it involves or encounters."
"All right. The operator of the ray can manipulate its various powers. It can push a bod
y away, great or small, or hold it locked in space, or drag it down to the very source of the green light."
"And I've had experience of all three aspects of the power," said Darragh.
She smiled up at him, and put her hand on his. He closed his own big hand around her fingers, and squeezed.
"Now, be careful," she whispered, "or I’ll forget what I was going to say."
"I was just remembering to say that I loved you."
"After something like forty or fifty minutes of acquaintance," she mocked him.
"Wonders can be done in that time. You said I was the first stranger you'd ever met, but I'm not a stranger any more. Ami?"
She shook her head happily. "Mark. Tell me something-am I the prettiest girl you ever knew?"
He looked at her closely, and slowly shook his head. "I doubt it. Down yonder on the Orinoco, there are girls so pretty that they just loaf around, knowing what a favor they do the men by letting themselves be looked at. You—hell, you're pretty, but you're not that kind of pretty."
"Beautiful, maybe?"
"Let's call you delicious. You taste good, look good, sound good. .."
"What were we talking about?" she broke in. "The green ray. I think it can even go around a comer. Some sort of mirror arrangement can reflect it at an angle."
"That's understandable," said Darragh. "But can't the ray be blocked off some way? A screen or curtain pushed across it to darken it? If we could do that, we could bring down the roof of this dome like a shower of cocoanuts on what the Cold People have for heads."
"Oh, you savage from down in the tropics!" she almost cried out. "You want to wreck their happy home."
"That's just what I want to do. Why not?"
"For one thing, I don't see how it can be done. I know of no way to cut across the ray's path, once the power is on. It would be like trying to cut through a steel rod with a dull knife."
"That green ray must have been what I've heard about, in the stories of the first invasion," suggested Darragh. "They made curtains of it, and bounced back bullets and bombs and shells. Well, all right; but something could throw the source or the reflector out of order. A grenade or bomb, for instance."
"Yes," she said, falling in with the humor. "A bomb of a considerable explosive force, set off in the middle of our court, might smash the walls of the shaft and jam all the fixtures."
"Now," Darragh told her, "you're talking like us savages from the tropics."
"You've infected me," she teased. "However, there aren't any such bombs to be had. We don't have chemicals to make explosives."
"We savages do." He squeezed her hand again. "Tell me more things about the green rays."
"They're used in all sorts of mechanisms. The Cold People use them to fly their ships, I understand, and to run motors and work levers and apply pressures and props. They operate their food-synthesizers with the rays."
"How do they make their food?"
"Oh, from the ordinary elements, to judge from the items we get. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen."
"Which means they come from a planet like ours," amplified Darragh. "What planet, Brenda? Mars? Jupiter? One of Jupiter's moons?"
"Our committee doubts that. Mars would be too warm, and Jupiter and Jupiter's moons would be too cold. But about making the food—the active principle of synthesizing seems to be distilled from a vegetable substance they've brought from their own home world."
"They ship it in?"
"No, apparently they grow it here. In bitter cold, of course. Big crops of it, in the polar regions."
"Just how do you people find out these things?"
"From Orrin Lyle," she said. "He can understand the Cold People, and make them understand him, by signs made back and forth at one of those view panels."
"And he gives himself airs because he can do that?" Dar-ragh's smile was wry this time. "Well, I won't belittle him. I wish I knew what the Cold People were saying. You don't suppose they can understand us?"
"I don't think so, because Orrin always interprets for us when there's anything to ask. Now, about the explosive ray."
"Yes," said Darragh eagerly, "how do they manage that thing? It must be unthinkably hot, beyond anything they can stand. What is the temperature range for them? I mean, what temperature they can endure."
"Orrin's father and grandfather made studies and estimates on that," Brenda told him. "They came to the conclusion that comfort point for the Cold Creatures is about sixty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. That would be like seventy degrees above for us."
"A difference of a hundred and thirty degrees, say," quickly computed Darragh.
"Zero would be like the most endurable summer heat to them," Brenda elaborated, "and a hundred below would be only a bracing tingle of frost. You see how this sort of temperature-comfort for them would rule out Mars as too warm, Jupiter as too cold."
"The explosion-ray would be too hot, though," Darragh said again.
She shook her head emphatically, and he relished the dance of golden sparkle in her hair. "No, Mark. The explosion-ray isn't hot at all. It doesn't effect explosion by heat. In fact, it's quite cold."
"That doesn't make sense!" he argued.
"It will if you'll let me finish. It simply changes the type of the water in whatever substance it encounters!. It changes ordinary water into H20."
He stared at her until she laughed aloud. "You look as if you'd suddenly swallowed a pebble."
"I won't swallow that one, Brenda. Listen, I know we're primitive and untaught and all those things Orrin Lyle charges us with down yonder in South America, but we have schools and a few books and so on. My own father was a teacher. And what's all this about changing water into H2OP Water is H,0, I've always heard."
"You've never heard the whole story," she insisted, still smiling. "Let me give you a little lesson in molecular science."
She got up and crossed to the bookshelf. From it she selected a volume with faded brown covers, and turned around again. "Now what are you goggling about?"
"I just watched you when you walked," he told her.
"Brenda, I was wrong in hesitating when you asked me if
you were the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. You are; it's just
soaking through to me."
"Oh," she laughed, "you're- looking at me through love-colored glasses. Let's stick to chemistry for a moment." Coming back, she sat down and opened the book. "This is the old Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, compiled in the earlier part of the twentieth century by Hodgman and Lange for use as a reference book by students in laboratory courses."
"And what does it say?" prompted Darragh.
"It says, ampng other basic facts in science, that normal water, the kind we see around us in rain and pools and so on —the kind we drink and wash in—is H20 merely in proportion."
"Isn't that what I was just arguing?" Darragh asked, mystified.
"Not at all. You know what molecules are, don't you?"
"Certainly I know what molecules are," he replied, somewhat huffily.
"All right. A normal water molecule, made up of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, gathers them in a special way. Not just two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen—naturally it forms from sixteen hydrogen atoms and eight oxygens."
"Is that what the book says?" he demanded "Then . .."
"Then the ordinary molecule of water isn't just three atoms; it doesn't look like a shamrock. It looks more like a raspberry. Quit sticking your big pale eyes out at me, Mark, and try to understand. The book knows what it's talking about."
"Of course it does, and so do you. Let me make a few notes."
He fumbled for his belt pouch under the robe, and got out scraps of paper and his hammered lead pencil. He poised the paper on his knee. "Now," he said, "you say that this ray somehow rearranges the atom—breaks up the complex molecules of water into smaller, simpler ones. But the proportions are the same—two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen. What's the big difference?"
"In th
e boiling points," replied Brenda. "It's far lower for the true H20. Human science never really made sure, but Cold-Creature science did. We can work it out pretty well by consideration of other known facts."
She turned pages in the brown book for a moment.
"Set down these figures," she directed him. "At the top of the column, put normal water—H20, with the boiling point at one hundred degrees Centigrade."
"Boiling point one hundred," Darragh said after her writing.
"Now let's take another hydrogen-containing liquid compound, hydrogen telluride. Boiling point is zero degrees Centigrade."
"I'm not acquainted with hydrogen telluride," confessed Darragh, writing.
"Neither am I particularly. I'm just quoting from what it says here in Hodgman and Lange. Got it down on your list?" "Right. H2Te, boiling point zero."
"Next in the column, hydrogen selenide—minus forty-two degrees Centigrade."
He looked over her shoulder for the chemical symbol, and jotted it down. "H2Se boils at minus 24. Ready for another here."
"And hydrogen sulphide," continued Brenda, her slim forefinger traveling down the page. "Boiling point, minus sixty. Now then, what have you got there?"
Darragh showed her his succession of figures:
H16Og ................................. boils at 100 degrees
" 0 "-42 "-60
"All right so far," pronounced Brenda. "Now we can progress on to hypothetical H20. It's not in the book but we can work it out roughly by comparing the weights of atoms in relation to each other."
"Maybe you can," he smiled ruefully, "but I can't."
"Then let me." She took the paper, leafed,- through the book to a table of atomic weights, and quickly scribbled several of them below Darragh's figures:
Tellurium weighs 127.5
Selenium " 79.2
Sulphur " 32.06
'And one more," she said. "Here it is.!
Oxygen weighs 16.00
Leaning close to her, Darragh felt her smooth cheek brush his rough one.
"In other words," he tried to sum up, "the boiling point varies inversely with the atomic weight."
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 Page 8