Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘One could hardly have lower types than these people,’ replied Carmen with a sidelong glance at the two giants.

  ‘These two are not running the Saucer,’ Kem put in. ‘They are obviously quite incapable of either building or navigating an amazing scientific instrument like this. We haven’t seen any others yet, but they must have their quarters on the lower deck.

  Estévan nodded. ‘You can be certain, too, that the people who do have the brains are very advanced types indeed. But when I spoke of low types just now I did not mean anything resembling a human being at all. As far as we know, vegetation is the only type of life that exists on Mars.’

  ‘What about the other planets?’ Kem enquired.

  ‘With the possible exception of Venus, it is most unlikely that any of them could support any form of life, as we understand it. Little Mercury has always been difficult to observe owing to her nearness to the Sun; but we know that she revolves very slowly indeed—if fact only once in her year, which is equivalent to 88 Earth days—and her day being as long as her year results in her having the same hemisphere perpetually exposed to the Sun. In consequence the centre of that sunny side can be nothing but baked glaring rock, and when her orbit brings her to her minimum distance from the Sun the temperature there is 770 degrees Fahrenheit. At that both tin and lead become molten, so nothing could conceivably live there. Her dark side would, of course, be equally uninhabitable owing to unchanging intense cold.’

  ‘What about her twilight belt, though? That might be inhabited.’

  ‘No. Quite apart from the necessity for a livable temperature, life cannot exist where there is no atmosphere. A planet’s life-blood is its water, which gradually lessens as it ages, both by absorption into its surface and conversion by the Sun’s rays into atmosphere. But atmospheres also lessen by gradual dissipation into the stratosphere, and the rate of their lessening is governed by the gravity of the planet concerned. Mercury’s gravity is only 27 of that of Earth; so her atmosphere would have been dissipated much faster.’

  ‘Can you be certain that she has none left?’

  ‘Yes. We can see atmospheres and measure their density. Of course, on the dark side of Mercury there must be a huge pack of ice. In the unlikely event of some celestial calamity—such as a great comet colliding with the planet—that might alter the whole situation. If she were thrown on to a different axis, or given a speedier rotation, the Sun’s rays would turn the ice to water and she would then be provided with a new atmosphere. But, as things are, if there is any atmosphere at all on Mercury it must be too rarefied for anything to live in it.’

  ‘What about Venus, then?’

  ‘Venus is the nearest to Earth, yet remains the greatest mystery of them all; and that is because she has too much atmosphere, or something very like it. The whole of her surface is almost always covered by dense layers of cloud several miles in depth. That is why we know practically nothing about her, except for the facts that she is very nearly as large as Earth and has a year of 224 days. The only chance we get to observe any markings on her is when there are occasional breaks in the clouds, which are believed to be caused by terrific volcanic eruptions. We do not even know the length of her day or the tilt of her axis in relation to her orbit. Some authorities are of the opinion that, like Mercury, she may have perpetual heat in one hemisphere and perpetual cold in the other; but that seems unlikely owing to her cloud formations. So far the spectroscope has failed to find the oxygen on Venus that plant life would certainly produce, or water; so a theory has been advanced that her cloud formations do not consist of water vapour, but a perpetual sandstorm caused by the tearing of high winds at a dry, reddish soil about as hot as the boiling point of water. One thing the spectroscope has revealed is that her atmosphere contains a far higher degree of carbon dioxide than the atmosphere of Earth. That would have the result of making conditions at her surface like those in a greenhouse. Should the solution to the puzzle be that there is water on her surface, but for some reason its vapour cannot get high enough for the spectroscope to detect it, we might expect to find there the type of vegetation that she has been depicted as having by sensational novelists. There would be thousands of square miles of steaming swamps, with great ferns and other vegetation growing in them, similar to that of the age of the dinosaurs on Earth.’

  ‘Then there may be life there,’ Carmen interjected. ‘Anyhow, animals like the brontosaurus and strange birds like the pterodactyl. If so, why not men?’

  Escobar shook his head. ‘The age of those giant beasts and that of man is millions of years apart in the progress of evolution. Even if there is any animal life at all on Venus it cannot be intelligent life. The range of vision of her surface is too limited. The combination of heat and water would create an almost impenetrable mist, through which, owing to the thick cloud layers, the Sun would never penetrate. Only certain primitive types of fish and reptiles could exist in that dank, hot semi-darkness. Light and sun are essential to the development of even an intelligent species of mammal, let alone man. As the lives of planets go, Mercury is an old, burnt-out world; Venus millions of years too young to be a possibility.’

  ‘What’s next on the list?’ Kem asked.

  ‘One that has already gone the way that Earth may go if our scientists are not very careful,’ Escobar replied with a faint smile. ‘In order of distance from the Sun the planets run: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars; and it is a curious fact that they do not seem to have taken up their positions arbitrarily, as each revolves in an approximately increasing ratio from the centre of the system. Between Mars and Jupiter there comes a wide gap; but between them, and just where we should expect it to be if we adhered to the ratio, there is strong evidence that there was once another planet. Now we see what must be its remains in the form of thousands of asteroids which continue to circle the Sun on what must have been its old orbit. Most of them are quite tiny; the largest, called Ceres, is only 480 miles in diameter. They are all that is left of a world that may have been very like ours.’

  ‘Do you think its scientists blew it up, then?’

  ‘Possibly. It may have exploded owing to internal causes. Earth is quite liable to do so at any time; although the people we have left behind us have not much cause to worry about that in view of the millions of years it has survived already. Again, it is possible that the world now only represented by the asteroids may have met its end owing to a collision with a big comet. But it is not at all outside the bounds of possibility that life developed there very much as it has on Earth, until one day somebody discovered how to split the atom. At any time after that a chain reaction might have been released, which clever people like myself found it impossible to stop, and the whole planet was blown to pieces.’

  ‘God, what an age to be born into,’ Kem groaned. ‘Just to think that everyone is now living under the constant threat that some fool monkeying with a Hydrogen bomb may put an end to everything without a moment’s warning.’

  ‘Not quite everyone,’ Carmen corrected him. ‘Naturally I should be sorry for my friends if they were all blown sky-high; but at least we no longer have to fear that sort of fate ourselves.’

  Kem’s broad grin suddenly lit up his face. ‘You’re right. If the back-room boys do slip up, from the place where we’re going we may even see the big bang. Then we’d be the last survivors of the human race. Perhaps this is a sort of Noah’s Ark without animals, and it will be up to…’ He had been about to say ‘… to us to carry on the old firm by begetting a new generation of mankind.’ Instead, he ended rather lamely, ‘to… er, pass on as much knowledge of our civilisation as we are able to between us.’

  Both the others guessed what he had really had in mind, and on account of all that it implied a rather awkward silence ensued. He broke it as soon as he could by asking Escobar, ‘Well, what comes next?’

  ‘Jupiter; the big boy of the Solar family,’ the scientist replied. ‘His mass is 317 times that of Earth and it would take you over ten time
s as long to make a journey round his equator. He is ice all over, and ice miles deep at that, with a surface temperature of minus 210 degrees Fahrenheit. No life could exist in such intense cold, and, that apart, life would be made impossible by the fact that his clouds are formed from ammonia crystals and his icy atmosphere mainly of methane gas. The only children Jupiter has ever had are his eleven moons, and all of them are, if possible, even deader than ours.

  ‘Saturn, the second largest of the family, comes next; with his nine moons and his beautiful rings formed by thousands of tiny asteroids. They are probably the fragments of two more moons he once had that collided. Anyhow, in this instance it is quite certain that no living being caused them to blow up, as his composition is similar to that of Jupiter and no form of life could possibly have arisen in seas of frozen methane.

  ‘Uranus, Neptune and Pluto complete the family. The two first are small by comparison with Jupiter and Saturn, but still big brothers compared with Earth. To them Pluto is relatively a midget, about halfway in size between Earth and Mercury. There is no possibility of life on any of them. Their atmospheres, too, are mainly composed of poisonous gases, and owing to their great distance from the Sun they are unbelievably cold and dark. If one were standing on Pluto and could see the sky through the clouds at all, it would be difficult to detect the rising of the Sun unless one knew where to look for it. The little planet is nearly forty times as far away from it as Earth, and at that distance the Sun would appear no larger than many of the other stars.’

  So ended the last discussion upon their possible destination that they were to have for some time. All the possibilities at all feasible in the light of man’s present knowledge had been reviewed and, unless there were other possibilities still entirely outside his range of speculation, it boiled down to one of two things. Either they were journeying towards one of the less distant stars, to land on a planet about which nothing whatever was known, but would be one of the comparatively few which it was logical to suppose had reached a period in its evolution during which beings of advanced intelligence could exist upon it; or they were being taken to Mars, about which a great deal was known, but which it was believed was capable of supporting only the lower forms of life.

  As they could see outside the Saucer only by peering down the lavatory chute, they had no means of finding out in what direction it was going. Neither could they form any estimate of the speed at which they were travelling; and even had they been able to it would have told them little, except that had they known it to be of the order of a million miles a second, or even the speed of light, that would have ruled out Mars, as the orbit followed by the red planet would have been long since left behind.

  Inside the Saucer there was no dawn, no evening and no night. As it whirled soundlessly through space its interior remained one unending day of never varying sunlight, dimmed only to the extent that, having had to filter through the Saucer’s roof, all glare had been eliminated from it. Kem’s wrist-watch had had its face smashed in at some point in his struggles that he could not recall. Escobar’s thin gold time-piece had come through unharmed in the breast pocket of his jacket, but had stopped before it occurred to him to look at it; so by the time he rewound it they had only the vaguest idea how many hours had passed since they had left Earth. But when rewound it enabled them to keep a count of days, and this led to the discovery that Saucerian time coincided nearly, but not exactly, with Earth time.

  At intervals the lids of the tanks containing the water-pipe and the beans sprang open, apparently of their own accord, and the two giants supervised the issue of rations from them. After this had happened a few times the captives jumped to the conclusion that the issue took place every twelve hours; so began looking forward expectantly to this small excitement and feel annoyance that it always seemed to lag a little behind schedule. But on actual timing it was found that the issue took place with irreproachable punctuality after each lapse of twelve hours and nineteen minutes.

  As far as thirst was concerned they wished that the intervals had been shorter; although they never suffered any acute inconvenience, because the temperature in the chamber was always kept at a degree only a little above chilly. Hunger never troubled them at all, as the beans, although deadly dull, seemed to fill this need and leave them with only just enough appetite to eat again when the next issue was handed out. Escobar was proved right in his prediction that the beans were a concentrate containing all the vitimins necessary to human nutrition, as after a few days of this grim diet, and having had time to recover from the shock and injuries they had sustained, the captives found themselves only a little thinner and once more in excellent health.

  Apart from supervising the issue of rations, the two giants did nothing whatever. For a great deal of the time they slept flat on their backs; during the remainder they squatted cross-legged side by side, staring goggle-eyed at the captives. Very occasionally they exchanged a few brief sentences in their throaty, uncouth tongue. They had nothing to occupy them and did not appear to desire it; but they were always awake when meal-times came round, and ate the larger ration of beans that they took for themselves with eager relish.

  The idea that they were little more than animals was reinforced by their likeness to each other. Their features were flat and had no distinguishing marks, the eyes and nostril hair of both were the same colour; and, except that one was a few inches taller than his companion, it would have been as difficult to say which was which had they been two sheep. Kem christened them Gog and Magog, and in one of his brighter moments said what a marvellous box-office draw they would make if only he could turn the tables and bring them back to Earth as prisoners.

  No other members of the crew appeared, and they gave only one brief sign of their presence. On what the captives counted as their second day out, while the giants were sleeping, Kem tried to open the little trap in the control tower, through which they had communicated with their masters on his rousing one of them to ask for water. Although the trap would have passed as invisible at a casual glance, he found it without difficulty; but its edges fitted so neatly into the pillar that they showed only as hairlines, and it was shut fast. After examining it carefully, he came to the reluctant conclusion that it would be impossible to prise it open, even with the aid of the most suitable small implement he could find among Carmen’s things. In consequence, he decided to try the procedure the giant had used, and rapped sharply on the pillar with his knuckles.

  Almost at once the trap sprang open, but it was too high up in the column for him to see into it. Swiftly he kicked the deck from under him, but overshot the mark and hit the ceiling. The second his head touched its whirling surface he was hurled away from it and spun round and round the chamber in mid-air, just as he had been soon after first regaining consciousness in it. While he was still floundering about and endeavouring to get a foothold on the deck, whoever was inside the control tower had evidently used some means to communicate with the giants, as they both woke. Magog seized him round the middle and shook him till his teeth rattled; meanwhile the trap snapped shut. As he had caught only a glimpse of what lay beyond it, and on recovering his breath could tell his companions no more than that the inside of the tower appeared to be filled with a complicated structure of girders.

  Boredom soon became the worst enemy of the captives. They slept as much as they could, but out of every twenty-four hours there were long stretches during which they lay in the gaps between the tanks, under their light screens of bedding, wooing sleep in vain. All of them read Carmen’s French novel through twice, then when she was not using her missal the men borrowed that in turn until they could find no more interest in it. They played guessing games and spelling games until they were sick of them, and talked of this and that until it seemed that they had exhausted every subject of conversation.

  Escobar made matters no easier by his attitude to Carmen. He kept his word about reproaching her no further, but his resentment against her had evidently gone very deep, a
s he never smiled at her, and spoke to her only with the distant politeness he would have used towards a stranger. She did not appear to resent his unspoken condemnation, and made no effort to win back his goodwill.

  After their first talk she had suffered a temporary relapse, and for long periods lay completely silent; but she showed no further signs of going out of her mind and after a few days gradually became more active, until she seemed quite normal, although she remained very subdued and spent much of her time at her devotions.

  In such cheerless company, even Kem’s natural exuberance wilted. Owing to the extremely low degree of gravity most forms of exercise were near impossible, but he kept himself as fit as he could by flexing his muscles and swimming round and round the chamber in its buoyant air. For his own amusement and that of the others he also practised his conjuring tricks, but again lack of gravity made sleight of hand unusually difficult.

  Inevitably their occupations palled and as the days passed he found himself looking covertly at Carmen more and more frequently. At first all of them had longed desperately for a bath, or at least the means to wash themselves. That desire had gradually worn off, and as the Saucer contained not a speck of dust none of them appeared to become any dirtier. Owing to lack of water with which to shave both the men had grown beards, which, still being in an early stage, were far from improving their appearance; but Carmen, having all her toilet requisites with her, continued to look as beautiful and desirable as ever.

  Her attitude to Kem was not encouraging, as although pleasant it was entirely impersonal. In vain he watched her for a clue which might help him to guess how she now regarded him. His feelings towards her had been only temporarily submerged during the fright, excitement and strangeness of their kidnapping; and, once they settled down, had returned with renewed persistence. Quite reasonably he argued that, since she had been so desperately in love with him, it was unlikely that her feelings had suffered permanent change either. But what about Escobar?