Adventures in the Far Future

by Donald A. Wollheim

  “I can’t see your objection,” said Page flatly. “After all, these Candles—”

  “You’re not capturing any Candles,” said Craig. “Your idea is the most crackpot, from more than one viewpoint, that I have ever heard.”

  “I can’t understand this strange attitude of yours,” argued Page. “I was assured at Washington—”

  Craig’s anger flared. “I don’t give a damn what Washington assured you. You’re going back as soon as the oxygen ship comes in. And you’re going back without a Candle.”

  “It would do no harm. And I’m prepared to pay well for any services you—

  Craig ignored the hinted bribe, leveled a pencil at Page.

  “Let me explain it to you once again,” he said. “I’ll explain it very carefully and in full, so you will understand.

  “The Candles are natives of Mercury. They were here first.

  They were here when men came, and they’ll probably be here long after men depart. They have let us be and we have let them be. And we have let them be for just one reason—one damn good reason. You see, we don’t know what they could do if we stirred them up. We are afraid of what they might do.”

  Page opened his mouth to speak, but Craig waved him into silence and went on.

  “They are organisms of pure energy: things that draw their life substance directly from the Sun—just as you and I do. Only we get ours by a roundabout way. They’re a lot more efficient than we are by that very token, for they absorb their energy direct, while we get ours by chemical processes.

  “And when we’ve said that much—that’s about all we can can say. Because that’s all we know about them. We’ve watched those Candles for five hundred years and they still are strangers to us.”

  “You think they are intelligent?” asked Page, and the question was a sneer.

  “Why not?” snarled Craig. “You think they aren’t because Man can’t communicate with them—just because they didn’t break their necks to talk with men.

  “Just because they haven’t talked doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligent. Perhaps they haven’t communicated with us because their thought and reasoning would have no common basis for intelligent communication with mankind. Perhaps it’s because they regard Man as an inferior race—a race upon which it isn’t even worth their while to waste their time.”

  “You’re crazy,” yelled Page. “They have watched us all these years. They’ve seen what we can do. They’ve seen our space ships; they’ve seen us build this plant; they’ve seen us shoot power across millions of miles to the other planets.”

  “Sure,” agreed Craig, “they’ve seen all that. But would it impress them? Are you sure it would? Man, the great architect! Would you bust a gut trying to talk to a spider, or an orchard oriole, or a mud wasp? You bet your sweet life you wouldn’t. And they’re great architects, every one of them.”

  Page bounced angrily in his chair. “If they’re superior to us,” he roared, “where are the things they’ve done? Where are their cities, their machines, their civilizations?”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Craig, “they outlived machines and cities millennia ago. Perhaps they’ve reached a stage of civilization where they don’t need mechanical things.”

  He tapped the pencil on the desk.

  “Consider this. Those Candles are immortal. They’d have to be. There’d be nothing to kill them. They apparently have no bodies—just balls of energy. That’s their answer to their environment. And you have the nerve to think of capturing some of them! You, who know nothing about them, plan to take them back to Earth to use as a circus attraction, a sideshow drawing card—something for fools to gape at!”

  “People come out here to see them,” Page countered. “Plenty of them. The tourist bureaus use them in their advertising.”

  “That’s different,” roared Craig. “If the Candles want to put on a show on home territory, there’s nothing we can do about it. But you can’t drag them away from here and show them off. That would spell trouble and plenty of it!”

  “But if they’re so damned intelligent,” yelped Page, “why do they put on those shows at all? Just think of something and presto!—they’re it. Greatest mimics in the Solar System. And they never get anything right. It’s always cockeyed. That’s the beauty of it.”

  “It’s cockeyed,” snapped Craig, “because man’s brain never fashions a letter-perfect image. The Candles pattern themselves directly after the thoughts they pick up. When you think of something you don’t give them all the details—your thoughts are sketchy. You can’t blame the Candles for that They pick up what you give them and fill in the rest as best they can. Therefore camels with flowing manes, camels with four and five humps, camels with horns, an endless parade of screwball camels—if camels are what you are thinking of.”

  He flung the pencil down angrily.

  “And don’t you kid yourself the Candles are doing it to amuse us. More than likely they believe we are thinking up all those swell ideas just to please them. They’re having the time of their lives. Probably that’s the only reason they’ve tolerated us here—because we have such amusing thoughts.

  “When Man first came here they were just pretty colored balls rolling around on the surface, and someone called them Roman Candles because that’s what they looked like. But since that day they’ve been everything Man ha§ ever thought of.”

  Page heaved himself out of the chair.

  “I shall report your attitude to Washington, Captain Craig.”

  “Report and be damned,” growled Craig. “Maybe you’ve forgotten where you are. You aren’t back on Earth, where bribes and boot-licking and bulldozing will get a man almost anything he wants. You’re at the power center on the Sunward side of Mercury. This is the main source of power for all the planets. Let this power plant fail, let the transmission beams be cut off and the Solar System goes to hell!”

  He pounded the desk for emphasis.

  “I’m in charge here, and when I say a thing it stands, for you as well as anyone. My job is to keep this plant going, keep the power pouring out to the planets. And I’m not letting some half-baked fool come out here and make me trouble. While I’m here, no one is going to stir up the Candles. We’ve got plenty of trouble without that.”

  Page edged toward the door, but Craig stopped him.

  “Just a little word of warning,” he said, speaking softly. “If I were you, I wouldn’t try to sneak out any of the puddle jumpers, including your own. After each trip the oxygen tank is taken out and put into the charger, so it’ll be at first capacity for the next trip. The charger is locked and there’s just one key. And I have that.”

  He locked eyes with the man at the door and went on.

  “There’s a little oxygen left in the jumper, of course. Half an hours supply, maybe. Possibly less. After that there isn’t any more. It’s not nice to be caught like that. They found a fellow that had happened to just a day or so ago over near one of the Twilight Belt stations.”

  But Page was gone, slamming the door.

  The Candles had stopped dancing and were rolling around, drifting bubbles of every hue. Occasionally one would essay the formation of some object, but the attempt would be halfhearted and the Candle once more would revert to its natural sphere.

  Old Creepy must have put his fiddle away, Craig thought. Probably he was making an inspection round, seeing if everything was all right. However, there was little chance that anything could go wrong. The plant was automatic, designed to run with the minimum of human attention.

  The control room was a wonder of clicking, chuckling, chortling, snicking gadgets—gadgets that kept the flow of power directed to the substations on the Twilight Belt, that kept the tight beams from the substations centered exactly on those points in space where each must go to be picked up by the substations circling the outer planets.

  Let one of those gadgets fail;—let that spaceward beam sway as much as a fraction of a degree—Curt shuddered at the thought of a b
eam of terrific power smashing into a planet —perhaps into a city. But the mechanism had never failed; it never would. It was foolproof and a far cry from the day when the planet had charged monstrous banks of converters to be carted to the outer worlds by lumbering space ships.

  Hus was really free power, easy power, plentiful power: power carried across millions of miles on Addison’s tight-beam principle; free power to develop the farms of Venus, the mines of Mars, the chemical plants and cold laboratories on Pluto.

  Down there in the control room, too, were other gadgets as equally important; the atmosphere machine, for example, which kept the air mixture right, drawing on those tanks of liquid oxygen and nitrogen and other gases brought across ‘ 65 space from Venus by the monthly oxygen ship; the refrigerating plant, the gravity machine, the water assembly.

  Craig heard the crunch of Creepy’s footsteps on the stairs and turned to the door as the old man shuffled into the room.

  “Earth just rounded the Sun,” the old man said. “The Venus station took up the load.”

  Craig nodded. That was routine. When one planet was cut off by the Sun, the substations of the nearest planet took off on an extra load, diverted part of it to the first planet’s stations, carrying it until it was clear again.

  He arose from the chair and walked to the port, stared out across the dusty plains. A dot was moving across the near horizon—a speedy dot, seemed to leap across the dead, gray wastes.

  “Knut’s coming!” he yelled to Creepy.

  Creepy hobbled for the doorway. “Til go down to meet him. Knut and me are having a game of checkers as soon as he gets in.”

  “First,” said Craig, “tell him I want to see him.”

  “Sure,” said Creepy.

  Craig tried to sleep but couldn’t. He was worried. It was nothing definite, for there seemed no cause to worry. The tracer placed on the big warp revealed that it was moving slowly, a few feet an hour or so, in a direction away from the center. No other large ones had shown up in the detectors. Everything, for the moment, seemed under control. But there were just little things: vague suspicions and wonderings, snatches here and there that failed to fall into the pattern.

  Knut, for instance. There wasn’t anything wrong with Knut, of course, but while he had talked to him he had sensed something. An uneasy feeling that lifted the hair on the nape of his neck, made the skin prickle along his spine. Yet nothing one could lay one’s hands on.

  Page, too. The damn fool probably would try to sneak out and capture some Candles and then there’d be all hell to pay.

  Funny, too, how Knut’s radios, both in his suit and in the jumper, had gone dead. Blasted out, as if they had been raked by a surge of energy. Knut couldn’t explain it, wouldn’t try. He just shrugged his Shoulders. Funny things always were happening on Mercury.

  Craig gave up trying to sleep, slid his feet into slippers and walked across the room to the port With a flip of his hand he raised the shutter and stared out.

  Candles were rolling around. Suddenly one of them materialized into a monstrous whiskey bottle, lifted in the air, tilted, liquid pouring to the ground.

  Craig chuckled. That would be Old Creepy day dreaming in a dry moment.

  A furtive tap came on the door, and Craig wheeled. For a tense moment he crouched, listening as if expecting an attack. Then he laughed softly to himself. He was jumpy, and no fooling. Maybe what he needed was a drink.

  Again the tap, more insistent, but still furtive.

  “Come in,” Craig called.

  Old Creepy sidled into the room. “I hoped you wasn’t asleep,” he said.

  “What is it, Creepy?” And even as he spoke, Craig felt himself going tense again. His nerves were all shot to hell.

  Creepy hitched forward.

  “Knut,” he whispered. “Knut beat me at checkers. Six times hand-running! I didn’t have a chance!”

  Craig’s laugh exploded in the room.

  “But I could always beat him before,” the old man insisted. “I even let him beat me every so often to keep him interested, so he would play with me. And tonight I was all set to take him to a cleaning—”

  Creepy’s face twisted, his mustache quivering.

  “And that ain’t all, by cracky. I felt, somehow, that Knut had changed and—”

  Craig walked close to the old man, grasped him by the shoulder. “I know,” he said. “I know just how you felt.” Again he was remembering how the hair had crawled upon his skull as he talked to Knut just a while ago.

  Creepy nodded, pale eyes blinking, Adam’s apple bobbing.

  Craig spun on his heel, snatched up his shirt, started peeling off his pajama coat.

  “Creepy,” he rasped, “you go down to that control room. Get a gun and lock yourself in. Stay there until I get back. And don’t let anyone come in!”

  He fixed the old man with a stare. “You understand. Don’t let anyone get in! Use your gun if you are forced to use it But see no one touches those controls/”

  Creepy’s eyes bugged and he gulped. “Is there going to be trouble?” he quavered.

  “I don’t know,” snapped Craig, but I’m going to find out.”

  Down in the garage, Craig stared angrily at the empty stall. Page’s jumper was gone!

  Grumbling with rage, Craig walked to the oxygen-tank rack. The lock was undamaged, and he inserted the key. The top snapped up and revealed the tanks—all of them, nestling in rows, still attached to the recharger lines. Almost unbelieving, Craig stood there, looking at the tanks.

  All of them were there. That meant Page had started out in the jumper with insufficient oxygen. It meant the man would die out on the blistering wastes of Mercury.

  Craig swung about, away from the tanks, and then stopped, thoughts spinning in his brain. There wasn’t any use of hunting Page. The damn fool probably was dead by now. Sheer suicide, that was what it was. Sheer lunacy. And he had warned him, too!

  And he, Craig, had work to do. Something had happened out there at the space warp. He had to lay those tantalizing suspicions that rummaged through his mind. There were some things he had to be sure about. He didn’t have time to go hunting a man who was already dead, a damn fool who had committed suicide. The man was nuts to start with. Anyone who thought he could capture Candles—

  Savagely, Craig closed one of the line valves, screwed shut the tank valve, disconnected the coupling and lifted the tank out of the rack. The tank was heavy. It had to be heavy to stand a pressure of two hundred atmospheres.

  As he started for the jumper, Mathilde, the cat, strolled down the ramp from the floor above and walked between his legs. Craig stumbled and almost fell, recovered his balance with a mighty effort and cursed Mathilde with a fluency born of practice.

  “Me-ow-ow-ow,” said Mathilde conversationally.

  There is something unreal about the Sunward side of Mercury, an abnormality that is sensed rather than seen.

  There the Sun is nine times larger than seen from Earth, and the thermometer never registers under six hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Under that terrific heat, accompanied by blasting radiations hurled out by the Sun, men must wear photocell space suits, must ride in photocell cars and live in the power center, which in itself is little more than a mighty photocell. For electric power can be disposed of, while heat and radiation often cannot be.

  There the rock and soil have been crumbled into dust under the lashing of heat and radiations. There the horizon is near, always looming just ahead, like an ever-present brink.

  But it is not these things that make the planet so alien. Rather, it is the strange distortion of lines, a distortion that one sometimes thinks he can see, but is never sure. Perhaps the very root of that alien sense is the fact that the Sun’s mass makes a straight line an impossibility, it is a stress that bends magnetic fields and stirs up the very structure of space itself.

  Curt Craig felt that strangeness of Mercury as he zoomed across the dusty plain. The puddle jumper splashed through a sma
ll molten pool, spraying it out in sizzling sheets—a pool of lead, or maybe tin.

  But Craig scarcely noticed. At the back of his brain pounded a thousand half-formed questions. His eyes, edged by crow’s-feet, squinted through the filter shield, following the trail left by Knut’s returning machine. The oxygen tank hissed softly and the atmosphere mixer chuckled. But all else was quiet.

  Looking back once Craig noticed a Candle—a big blue one. It seemed to be following him. But he soon forgot all about it Craig glanced at the notation of the space warp’s location. Only a few miles distant. He was almost there.

  There was nothing to indicate what the warp might be, although the instruments picked it up and charted it as he drew near. Perhaps if a man stood at just the right angle he might detect a certain shimmer, a certain strangeness, as if he were looking into a wavy mirror. But otherwise there probably would be nothing pointing to its presence. It was hard to know just where one stopped or started. Hard to keep from walking into one, even with instruments.

  Curt shivered as he thought of the spacemen who had walked into just such warps in the early days. Daring mariners of space who had ventured to land their ships on the Sunward side, had dared to take short excursions in their old-type space suit. Most of them had died, blasted by the radiations spewed out by the Sun, literally cooked to death. Others had walked across the plain and disappeared. They had walked into the warps and disappeared as if they had melted into thin air. Although, of course, there wasn’t any air to melt into—hadn’t been for many million years.

  On this world, all free elements long ago had disappeared. Those elements that remained, except possibly far underground, were locked so stubbornly in combination that it was impossible to blast them free in any appreciable quantity. That was why liquid air was carted clear from Venus.

  The tracks in the dust and rubble made by Knut’s machine were plainly visible, and Craig followed them. The jumper topped a slight rise and dipped into a slight depression. And in the center of the depression was a queer shifting of light and dark, as if one were looking into a tricky mirror.