“No further. Spaceship right here.”
“Here!” Cardew looked round in puzzlement. He only saw the bleak desolation of that ammoniated shore. “Think again, Jo!” he said. “I reckon we’ve another hundred and fifty miles to cover at least.”
“Get wise to yourself!” Jo suggested calmly. Then he motioned, with his thick arm, toward the cliffs.
Fatigued though they were, the two got to their feet and followed him, stopping finally before the argent masses. Jo pointed to the red ground and grinned gleefully.
Cardew started and the girl gave a little cry as they beheld a mighty circle of metal, apparently similar to itanium, sunken into the redness—a colossal manhole cover.
“We live below,” Jo explained calmly. “Rarely come up except for special reason. Two reasons this time. We have many instruments. They showed us spaceship fall and two people leaving prison settlement. I was told to get the lot—you and spaceship.”
Cardew felt something clutch at his heart. “You—you damned traitorous little horror!” he burst out. “You mean you’ve kept up with us all this time so you could turn us into your rotten underworld? Why, you—”
“Keep on shirt!” Jo interrupted quickly. “No captives. I could easily lose you. Our leader wants you, sure—but I don’t. Prefer to help. Very clever and generous; that’s me.”
“You mean you’ll let us go?” Claire asked anxiously.
“You betcha!”
“But how can we—without a spaceship?” Cardew yelped. “You say you were told to capture it—”
“I did; it’s down below—but only in the first gallery. I can get it. Now you know how came I on the surface to meet you. Obeying orders.”
“That’s clear enough.” Cardew nodded tensely. “But about the ship. You say it’s below. Did you drive it here?”’
“I can do anything. I carried it.”
“Carried it?” Cardew’s voice was faint with amazement.
“Sure. Damned easy! I’ll show you.”
The two stood aside and watched, in bewilderment, as he locked his hand in the manhole’s ring and pulled with all his power. By degrees the great valve rose upward under his enormous strength until it was vertical. Then he jumped down into a cavernous pit.
For nearly five minutes the two waited; then they both gasped in surprise as the familiar, blunted nose of a small private space flier began to appear. Little by little the whole ship began to emerge, thrust up the long pit incline by Jo’s tremendous muscles. When at last it was on the flat ground he looked at them anxiously.
“Down below it was safe from pressure for much longer time than up,” he explained. “Better go quick, scram. Very light to me—almost vacuum.”
Cardew quickly looked the ship over. It was only dented from its earlier fall. He turned to Jo. “Did you manage to find out who it belonged to?”
“Sure. Two people like you—Pluto travelers. Caught in drag and crashed—necks broken. I read their brains before I threw them outside. Darned smart of me, and then some!”
Cardew looked; at him gratefully. “You’re a great scout, Jo,” he said warmly. “I only wish I could repay your generosity. Your orientation was right, by the way. How the devil you knew your way to these cliffs from the Fishnet is more than I can figure.”
Jo’s huge mouth grinned expansively.
“Oriental sense first class,” he agreed modestly. “You carbohydrates—me ammonia, but we think regular, Darned good race mine. Wish I could come with you, but your world would let my compressed body blow apart. No dice and deep regrets offered right now.”
“There must be something we can do!” the girl insisted, turning toward the spaceship’s airlock.
“Perhaps—crystals?” Jo said almost shyly.
Laughing, Cardew unhooked the container from his belt and tossed it over. Then, with a final farewell, he and the girl passed inside the vessel and screwed up the airlock.
Once their stifling suits were removed, Cardew fired the rocket tubes. With a grinding roar, the ship tore furiously against the gravity; the terrific drag of Jupiter made itself evident instantly, a drag mounting with every second that the ship boomed and exploded upward from that titanic world.
In eight minutes both Claire and Cardew were unconscious, robot machinery alone firing the tubes. Then, little by little, as the distance increased and the gravity correspondingly lessened, they came out of insensibility, to find Jupiter a vast, banded disk behind them. Ahead was the void with the single green star of Earth plainly visible in the firmament.
“We made it!” Cardew breathed thankfully. “We actually made it!”
“Thanks to Jo,” the girl put in quietly. “I shall never see smelling salts again but what I’ll think of him.”
Cardew did not answer, but he was smiling.
WHISPERING SATELLITE
BY THORNTON AYRE
From Astounding Stories, February 1938
In September 1937, John W. Campbell became the new editor at Astounding, succeeding Orlin Tremaine. It was Campbell who accepted the next Ayre story, “The Whispering Satellite” on 22 October 1937 (along with Fearn’s “Red Heritage”).
The story was heavily influenced by Weinbaum, and had a controversial reception because of this. Most readers praised it, one rating it one of the best ten stories of the year. Writing in the May 1938 issue reader Patricia Evans summed things up:
“It seems that whenever a reader dislikes a story that tries to be humorous he immediately states in his Brass Tacks:
“‘Was—trying to imitate Stanley Weinbaum?’
“I fully realize the exalted place Stanley G. Weinbaum occupies in the hearts of science fictioneeers and that this phrase is meant as a flattering comparison, but how does the author feel about it? If he writes a new story, someone is sure to say—‘Reminiscent of Weinbaum’. Compliment though it is intended, I don’t imagine the writer enjoys being compared with a rival. Just because his story was ‘different.’ Now it is ridiculous to suppose that Stanley G. Weinbaum holds first rights to every type of plot in existence that is in any way entertaining. But one gathers that impression from the letters published.
“Last issue, Thornton Ayre’s ‘Whispering Satellite’ was pounced upon by the back-biters. Before that it was ‘Surgical Error’ which was hallelujahed as a ‘gift from Weinbaum.’ This issue, I imagine, John Victor Peterson will squirm when he reads that his ‘Martyrs Don’t Mind Dying’ is grand reading, superbly written, clever and—‘reminiscent of Weinbaum’.”
Although Cambell had dryly headed the letter: “Are all time-travelers ‘imitating H. G. Wells?’ he had in fact already made up his mind. He wrote to ‘Ayre’ personally, and explained that, as a matter of editorial policy, he had decided not to run any more such stories in the magazine. Accordingly, he rejected the story’s sequel, “Domain of Zero”. Simply too many authors were imitating Weinbaum, and Campbell was not happy at the trend. He did, however, invite him to continue writing for Astounding—but with a change of style.
WHISPERING SATELLITE
The System’s finest basso more than proves his worth—
Discovered—the finest basso in the System!
“Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep—”
The flawless, basso-profundo voice ceased. Clark Mitchell stopped humming the tune that had prompted those notes, and looked up across the crude table toward the great, heavy-stemmed flower standing in the Saturnshine streaming through the window.
Sometimes he rather regretted the time two earth-years before when he had taught this particular product of Titan’s Whispering Forest to sing. He knew it did it by air suction through its broad yellow face, vibrating in turn on hair-like vocal cords, but he’d never quite gotten over the uncanny effect of it.
Two years on Titan had done much to orient Clark into the strangeness of this little satellite flying round its primary in fifteen days, twenty-two odd hours—a little desert island of a world, ba
thed in the torrid heat of Saturn 770,000 miles distant. Unlike Jupiter, the ringed world has cooled less swiftly and pours its warmth on its whole retinue of moons.
Of course, Clark hadn’t come to Titan for pleasure. He’d been fleeing Earth when the thing had happened—a jammed recoil tube, a dizzy spin, then Titan—with his machine wrecked beyond repair. Fleeing Earth because a girl looked likely for putting him in a spot for a murder he’d never committed.
He smiled bitterly now as he thought of her—Nan Henshaw. He wondered how he’d ever come to love her in the first place; why, even still loved her.
And now? Well, like any other marooned traveler out of the line of the regular space ways he’d done a Robinson Crusoe act and fixed himself up as best he could. He had such food as the jungle provided; his spaceship water equipment gave him water from the atmosphere. It was just a case of waiting—waiting for the day when he might possibly be rescued from this steamy, saturating wilderness with its thick, murmuring jungle and varying moonlight, primary-light, and distant sunlight.
Of coarse, there were vilictus deposits somewhere to the north of the satellite—metallic compound of enormous value to Earth chemists in the making of explosives. Clark’s ship detectors had revealed the presence of the deposits, but all his searching had been futile. And the stuff was worth three thousand a gram! If outsiders ever heard of it, there’d be a second Klondike on Titan.
At least, he wasn’t lonely. Basso, the singing plant, was company for one thing, and so were its weird, sub-intelligent, singing contemporaries in the Whispering Forest outside. Then there was Snakehips, a true Titanian, actually an upright mass of quivering, darting gristle—entirely invertebrate—pretty intelligent so far as he went. His own race had their abode to the south of the little world, but mainly because Clark had once saved him from death at the hands of the blue biters, he’d elected to stay with him ever after that.
Clark roused himself from his reflective mood as he thought of these things, ran a troubled hand through his crudely cut black hair. He glanced at the calendar on the wooden wall—20th July 2614.
“Wonder how many more Julys are going to come and go on the earth-scale before I get out of this blasted hole?” he muttered. Moodily he studied the sky.
To the west, halved by the horizon, magnificent Saturn was slowly turning on his ten-hour revolution, the shadow of his rings, even to the bright streak of Cassini’s Division, curving in a gray, arcing penumbra across his banded disk. In the east the ridiculous sun, shedding but one three-hundredth of the light normal on Earth, was nearly at the zenith. In other directions, at varied distances, Iapetus, Tethys, and Hyperion were shedding their differing light-strengths according to their particular albedos.
He glanced toward the fantastic Whispering Forest and listened for a while to the weird, senseless chanting of the talking plants. Behind him, Basso began to wail the bass aria from Isis and Osiris—Clark twisted round in nervy exasperation.
“Oh shut up!” he screamed furiously. “Basso! Shut up, I tell you!”
Silence fell instantly. Basso’s blossoms closed up timidly. Its sensitive organism responded instantly to human emotions. The forest, too, was suddenly subdued. As Clark turned to re-enter the hut, there came something else that made him halt. It was something apart from the notes of the forest—a deep, husky voice, unmistakably that of a human being!
“I tell you, Nan, that this is ridiculous! We’re heading the wrong way entirely—”
The voice broke off. Two figures emerged from the jungle in the mixture of blue and green lights, one a slim girl and the other a rotund man of middle age. They were both attired in what had once been white, tropical clothes.
Seeing Clark, they stopped dead. He stared back at them with sagging jaw. It just didn’t make sense! Nan Henshaw—here? And her father, too, the drunken old rascal—
“Clark!” the girl screamed suddenly. She raced joyfully across the clearing—too joyfully indeed. She overlooked the lesser gravity and fell sprawling in Clark’s outthrust arms. Rather mechanically he steadied her, then dropped his arms slackly, surveying her pretty face with the dark hair peeping damply under the white hat.
“Of course this is a dream,” he said hopelessly. “You just can’t be real because—”
“Who isn’t real?” snorted Henshaw, coming up and then leaning back so that his ample stomach protruded. He mopped his shiny brow vigorously. “I’d have you know, young man, that Nan has been searching space for you for two years! We tried everywhere, and Saturn’s moons were the last hope. We saw your hut from the ship and landed over by a crazy-looking mountain range. Then we came through this forest.” He looked back at it disgustedly. “Sure makes you plenty thirsty,” he finished reflectively.
“You sound real enough anyway,” Clark said dryly. He looked from one to the other of them. It was real enough all right, but the murder frame-up— His lips tightened a little.
“Better come inside,” he invited briefly. It felt good to speak to human beings again. “If we stop out here too long, we’re likely to attract the blue biters, and that means a whole lot of trouble. Their migratory period is about due.”
He preceded them into the hut and kicked forward crude chairs.
“Sorry I’ve no highballs,” he remarked, lifting a bottle of red fluid from his jumbled equipment. “Try this—it’s sephma juice. Not bad, but highly intoxicating; roughly 50% alcohol basis.”
The girl ignored the drink, but her father rubbed his hands complacently, sank down with a deep “Ah!” and mopped his face. The cork popped—
Quietly Nan took Clark’s hands, looked at him seriously.
“Listen, Clark, I know what you’re thinking—that I was responsible for you getting into that murder mess back home. But I wasn’t! Honest, I wasn’t! The minute I knew you’d left to wander around in space, I had father build a private machine and cruise around to find you. I thought long ago you’d met with disaster or something. Then as we studied Titan—” She stopped and her dark eyes were suddenly intense. “Clark, you do believe me, don’t you?”
“You mean you were framed as much as me? That we were poisoned toward each other by idle gossip?”
“Just that,” she nodded seriously. “The real murderer was found long ago. If I didn’t love you, why otherwise would I search space for you?”
That was logical enough. Clark rubbed his roughly clipped hair ruefully, “Guess I’ve been a sucker, Nan—but somehow I never could quite figure how you turned out like that—”
He broke off and turned as Snakehips came quietly in. The girl drew back quickly. Her father lowered thc bottle of sephma, looked at it doubtfully, then back to Snakehips— The Titanian came forward on his rubbery feet—a nine-foot, upright worm, incredibly flexible, surprisingly human in main contours, with big, serious green eyes and a flapping mouth.
“Blue biters coming,” he announced phlegmatically.
Clark started. “Then we’ve got to get away from here quick!” He turned to the girl. “Where exactly is your ship?”
“Beyond that funny mountain range that looks like”—she thought swiftly—“like knife blades!”
He nodded briefly and said: “Piano Key Range, eh? That’s eight miles to the north—”
Henshaw interrupted him. “Just a minute! What the hell are these blue biters? And Piano Key Range?”
Clark grinned faintly. “I forgot you don’t know the local geography. Piano Key Range is merely called that because of its resemblance to a keyboard. The blue biters is a name of my own for the technically classified sapphiritus termite, or blue ants of Titan. Damned deadly things,” he went on seriously. “The white ants of Earth have nothing on them. They fly like locusts and eat every darn thing in sight. Periodically they migrate and eat all wood and flesh in their path; metals they leave alone.”
“Mind if I take this sephma?” Henshaw ventured. “Good stuff to drink in case—”
“I’m drinking—drinking—drinking—” rumbl
ed Basso from the window.
Henshaw leaped up in sudden fright, then he shook himself unbelievingly at the sight of the humming plant. Clark gripped his arm.
“Come on, sir, we haven’t a moment to waste— Listen!”
They fell into quiet. Above the murmurings of the forest, there was a dull buzzing note, rising and falling in beating cadences, the whir of a million wings. The oblong of Saturn-and-Hyperion-light in the doorway began to dim.
“The biters!” Clark muttered tensely. “Clouds of ’em, blotting out the light— We may make it yet! Snakehips, give us a hand!”
The Titanian sprang across the room in a little bound, but the only thing he did was to grip Basso, complete with pot.
“What the hell—?” Clark demanded impatiently.
“Help,” the Titanian said ambiguously, and Clark gave it up. Snakehips’ ideas were beyond him.
Cautiously, they all moved to the doorway—and met a humming barrier of flying, viciously biting shapes, half ant and half grasshopper in appearance, each about three inches long.
The heavy moist air was thick with the things; they crawled on the sloppy ground, smothered the walls and roof of the hut, were black in numberless myriads against the wild sky.
“Here’s my gun, Clark,” the girl said briefly, jerking it out of her pocket. “Five charges in it.”
He took it from her, tossed his awkward provision pack further round his shoulders, then plunged forward. The girl and her father, he clutching his sephma bottle, floundered behind him. Both of them staggered in the weak gravity; Henshaw in fact was half intoxicated.
Immediately, all three of them were smothered in the little horrors. Teeth bit into every portion of exposed flesh, tore clothing to ribbons. Clark found his hands mottled with drawn blood-specks.
“Run like hell!” he cried hoarsely. “They’ll thin down in the forest because the flowers’ll get ’em—”
Henshaw and the girl plunged beside him as he flayed round with a blast from the ray-gun. Behind him in the clouded light he saw his hut already smothered with biters as thickly as flypaper in midsummer. A thousand of the things vanished at the slash of the gun, but ten thousand refilled the gap.
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