Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Norris had given orders to return to the Marie Galante, and the rest of us were sullenly making ready to start the back trail. Mason, however, deliberately seized his pick and began chopping a hole in the rock surface, preparatory apparently to erecting his plastic tent.

  "We'll make temporary camp here," he said calmly. "Brandt, you can go back to the ship and bring back the rest of the women." He turned and smiled sardonically at Navigator Norris.

  Norris quietly knocked the ashes from his pipe and placed it in his pocket. He strode forward, took the pick from Mason's hands and flung it away. Then he seized Mason by the coat, whipped him around and drove his fist hard against the younger man's jaw.

  "When you signed on for this voyage, you agreed to obey my orders," he said, not raising his voice. "You'll do just that."

  Mason picked himself up, and there was an ugly glint in his eyes. He could have smashed Norris to a pulp, and none knew it better than the Navigator. For a brief instant the younger man swayed there on the balls of his feet, fists clenched. Then he let his hands drop, walked over and began to put on his packsack.

  But I had seen Mason's face, and I knew he had not given in as easily as it appeared. Meanwhile he began to circulate among the passengers, making no offers, yet subtly enlisting backers for a policy, the significance of which grew on me slowly. It was mutiny he was plotting! And with his personal charm and magnetism he had little trouble in winning over converts. I came upon him arguing before a group of the women one day, among them his own wife, Estelle. He was standing close to her.

  "We have clothing and equipment and food concentrate," Mason said. "Enough to last two generations. We have brains and intelligence, and we certainly should be able to establish ourselves without the aid of other vertebrate forms of life.

  "Coulora, Jama, Tenethon, Mokrell, R-9, and Stragella. We could have settled on any one of those planets, and apparently we should have, for conditions have grown steadily worse at each landing. But always the answer is no. Why? Because Norris says we must go on until we find animal life."

  He cleared his throat and gazed at the feminine faces before him. "Go where? What makes Norris so sure he'll find life on any planet in this system? And incidentally where in the cosmos is this system?"

  One of the women, a tall blonde, stirred uneasily. "What do you mean?" she said.

  "I mean we don't know if our last landing was on Stragella or Coulora. I mean we don't know where we are or where we're going, and I don't think Norris does either. We're lost!"

  That was in August. By the last of September we had landed on two more planets, to which Norris gave the simple names of R-12 and R-14. Each had crude forms of vegetable life, represented principally by the blue hensorr trees, but in neither case did the organic surveyor reveal the slightest traces of animal life.

  There was, however, a considerable difference in physical appearance between R-12 and R-14, and for a time that fact excited Norris tremendously. Up to then, each successive planet, although similar in size, had exhibited signs of greater age than its predecessor. But on R-12 there were definite manifestations of younger geologic development.

  Several pieces of shale lay exposed under a fold of igneous rock. Two of those pieces contained fossils of highly developed ganoids, similar to those found on Venus. They were perfectly preserved.

  It meant that animal life had existed on R-12, even if it didn't now. It meant that R-12, though a much older planet than Earth, was still younger than Stragella or the rest.

  For a while Norris was almost beside himself. He cut out rock samples and carried them back to the ship. He personally supervised the tuning of the surveyors. And when he finally gave orders to take off, he was almost friendly to Mason, whereas before his attitude toward him had been one of cold aloofness.

  But when we reached R-14, our eighth landing, all that passed. For R-14 was old again, older than any of the others.

  And then, on October sixteenth, Mason opened the door of the locked cabin. It happened quite by accident. One of the arelium-thaxide conduits broke in the Marie Galante's central passageway, and the resulting explosion grounded the central feed line of the instrument equipment. In a trice the passageway was a sheet of flame, rapidly filling with smoke from burning insulation.

  Norris, of course, was in the bridge cuddy with locked doors between us and him, and now with the wiring burned through there was no way of signalling him he was wanted for an emergency. In his absence Mason took command.

  That passageway ran the full length of the ship. Midway down it was the door leading to the women's lounge. The explosion had jammed that door shut, and smoke was pouring forth from under the sill. All at once one of the women rushed forward to announce hysterically that Mason's wife, Estelle, was in the lounge.

  Adjoining the lounge was a small cabin which since the beginning of our voyage had remained locked. Norris had given strict orders that that cabin was not to be disturbed. We all had taken it as a matter of course that it contained various kinds of precision instruments.

  Now, however, Mason realized that the only way into the lounge was by way of that locked cabin. If he used a heat blaster on the lounge door there was no telling what would happen to the woman inside.

  He ripped the emergency blaster from its wall mounting, pressed it to the magnetic latch of the sealed cabin door and pressed the stud. An instant later he was leading his frightened wife, Estelle, out through the smoke.

  The fire was quickly extinguished after that and the wiring spliced. Then when the others had drifted off, Mason called Brandt and me aside.

  "We've been wondering for a long time what happened to Ganeth-Klae, the Martian inventor who worked with Norris to invent Indurate," he said very quietly. "Well, we don't need to wonder any more. He's in there."

  Brandt and I stepped forward over the sill--and drew up short. Ganeth-Klae was there all right, but he would never trouble himself about making a voyage in a locked cabin. His rigid body was encased in a transparent block of amber-colored solidifex, the after-death preservative used by all Martians.

  Both of us recognized his still features at once, and in addition his name-tattoo, required by Martian law, was clearly visible on his left forearm.

  * * * * *

  For a brief instant the discovery stunned us. Klae dead? Klae whose IQ had become a measuring guide for the entire system, whose Martian head held more ordinary horse sense, in addition to radical postulations on theoretical physics, than anyone on the planets. It wasn't possible.

  And what was the significance of his body on Norris' ship? Why had Norris kept its presence a secret and why had he given out the story of Klae's disappearance?

  Mason's face was cold as ice. "Come with me, you two," he said. "We're going to get the answer to this right now."

  We went along the passage to the circular staircase. We climbed the steps, passed through the scuttle and came to the door of the bridge cuddy. Mason drew the bar and we passed in. Norris was bent over the chart table. He looked up sharply at the sound of our steps.

  "What is the meaning of this intrusion?" he said.

  It didn't take Mason long to explain. When he had finished, he stood there, jaw set, eyes smouldering.

  Norris paled. Then quickly he got control of himself, and his old bland smile returned.

  "I expected you to blunder into Klae's body one of these days," he said. "The explanation is quite simple. Klae had been ill for many months, and he knew his time was up. His one desire in life was to go on this expedition with me, and he made me promise to bury him at the site of our new colony. The pact was between him and me, and I've followed it to the letter, telling no one."

  Mason's lips curled in a sneer. "And just what makes you think we're going to believe that story?" he demanded.

  Norris lit a cigar. "It's entirely immaterial to me whether you believe it or not."

  But the story was believed, especially by the women, to whom the romantic angle appealed and Mason's e
mbryonic mutiny died without being born, and the Marie Galante sailed on through uncharted space toward her ninth and last landing.

  As the days dragged by and no word came from the bridge cuddy, restlessness began to grow amongst us. Rumor succeeded rumor, each story wilder and more incredible than the rest. Then just as the tension had mounted to fever pitch, there came the sickening lurch and grinding vibration of another landing.

  Norris dispensed with his usual talk before marching out from the ship. After testing the atmosphere with the ozonometer, he passed out the heat pistols and distributed the various instruments for computing radioactivity and cosmic radiation.

  "This is the planet Nizar," he said shortly. "Largest in the field of the sun Ponthis. You will make your survey as one group this time. I will remain here."

  He stood watching us as we marched off down the cliff side. Then the blue hensorr trees rose up to swallow him from view. Mason swung along at the head of our column, eyes bright, a figure of aggressive action. We had gone but a hundred yards when it became apparent that, as a planet, Nizar was entirely different from its predecessors. There was considerable top soil, and here grew a tall reed-shaped plant that gave off varying chords of sound when the wind blew.

  It was as if we were progressing through the nave of a mighty church with a muted organ in the distance. There was animal life too, a strange lizard-like bird that rose up in flocks ahead of us and flew screaming overhead.

  "I don't exactly like it, Bagley," he said. "There's something unwholesome about this planet. The evolution is obviously in an early state of development, but I get the impression that it has gone backward; that the planet is really old and has reverted to its earlier life."

  Above us the sky was heavily overcast, and a tenuous white mist rising up from the hensorr trees formed curious shapes and designs. In the distance I could hear the swashing of waves on a beach.

  Suddenly Mason stopped. "Look!" he said.

  Below us stretched the shore of a great sea. But it was the structure rising up from that shore that drew a sharp exclamation from me. Shaped in a rough ellipse, yet mounted high toward a common point, was a large building of multiple hues and colors. The upper portion was eroded to crumbling ruins, the lower part studded with many bas-reliefs and triangular doorways.

  "Let's go," Mason said, breaking out into a fast loping run.

  The building was farther away than we had thought, but when we finally came up to it, we saw that it was even more of a ruin than it had at first appeared. It was only a shell with but two walls standing, alone and forlorn. Whatever race had lived here, they had come and gone.

  We prowled about the ruins for more than an hour. The carvings on the walls were in the form of geometric designs and cabalistic symbols, giving no clue to the city's former occupants' identity.

  And then Mason found the stairs leading to the lower crypts. He switched on his ato-flash and led the way down cautiously. Level one ... level two ... three ... we descended lower and lower. Here water from the nearby sea oozed in little rivulets that glittered in the light of the flash.

  We emerged at length on a wide underground plaisance, a kind of amphitheater, with tier on tier of seats surrounding it and extending back into the shadows.

  "Judging from what we've seen," Mason said, "I would say that the race that built this place had reached approximately a grade C-5 of civilization, according to the Mokart scale. This apparently was their council chamber."

  "What are those rectangular stone blocks depending from the ceiling?" I said.

  Mason turned the light beam upward. "I don't know," he said. "But my guess is that they are burial vaults. Perhaps the creatures were ornithoid."

  Away from the flash the floor of the plaisance appeared to be a great mirror that caught our reflections and distorted them fantastically and horribly. We saw then that it was a form of living mold, composed of millions of tiny plants, each with an eye-like iris at its center. Those eyes seemed to be watching us, and as we strode forward, a great sigh rose up, as if in resentment at our intrusion.

  There was a small triangular dais in the center of the chamber, and in the middle of it stood an irregular black object. As we drew nearer, I saw that it had been carved roughly in the shape of this central building and that it was in a perfect state of preservation.

  Mason walked around this carving several times, examining it curiously.

  "Odd," he said. "It looks to be an object of religious veneration, but I never heard before of a race worshipping a replica of their own living quarters."

  Suddenly his voice died off. He bent closer to the black stone, studying it in the light of the powerful ato-flash. He got a small magnifying glass out of his pocket and focused it on one of the miniature bas-reliefs midway toward the top of the stone. Unfastening his geologic hammer from his belt, he managed, with a sharp, swinging blow, to break off a small protruding piece.

  He drew in his breath sharply, and I saw his face go pale. I stared at him in alarm.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  He motioned that I follow and led the way silently past the others toward the stair shaft. Climbing to the top level was a heart-pounding task, but Mason almost ran up those steps. At the surface he leaned against a pillar, his lips quivering spasmodically.

  "Tell me I'm sane, Bagley," he said huskily. "Or rather, don't say anything until we've seen Norris. Come on. We've got to see Norris."

  * * * * *

  All the way back to the Marie Galante, I sought to soothe him, but he was a man possessed. He rushed up the ship's gangway, burst into central quarters and drew up before Navigator Norris like a runner stopping at the tape.

  "You damned lying hypocrite!" he yelled.

  Norris looked at him in his quiet way. "Take it easy, Mason," he said. "Sit down and explain yourself."

  But Mason didn't sit down. He thrust his hand in his pocket, pulled out the piece of black stone he had chipped off the image in the cavern and handed it to Norris.

  "Take a look at that!" he demanded.

  Norris took the stone, glanced at it and laid it down on his desk. His face was emotionless. "I expected this sooner or later," he said. "Yes, it's Indurate all right. Is that what you want me to say?"

  There was a dangerous fanatical glint in Mason's eyes now. With a sudden quick motion he pulled out his heat pistol.

  "So you tricked us!" he snarled. "Why? I want to know why."

  I stepped forward and seized Mason's gun hand. "Don't be a fool," I said. "It can't be that important."

  Mason threw back his head and burst into an hysterical peal of laughter. "Important!" he cried. "Tell him how important it is, Norris. Tell him."

  Quietly the Navigator filled and lighted his pipe. "I'm afraid Mason is right," he said. "I did trick you. Not purposely, however. And in the beginning I had no intention of telling anything but the truth. Actually we're here because of a dead man's vengeance."

  Norris took his pipe from his lips and stared at it absently.

  "You'll remember that Ganeth-Klae, the Martian, and I worked together to invent Indurate. But whereas I was interested in the commercial aspects of that product, Klae was absorbed only in the experimental angle of it. He had some crazy idea that it should not be given to the general public at once, but rather should be allocated for the first few years to a select group of scientific organizations. You see, Indurate was such a departure from all known materials that Ganeth-Klae feared it would be utilized for military purposes.

  "I took him for a dreamer and a fool. Actually he was neither. How was I to know that his keen penetrating brain had seen through my motive to get control of all commercial marketing of Indurate? I had laid my plans carefully, and I had expected to reap a nice harvest. Klae must have been aware of my innermost thoughts, but Martian-like he said nothing."

  Norris paused to wet his lips and lean against the desk. "I didn't kill Ganeth-Klae," he continued, "though I suppose in a court of law I would be judged respo
nsible for his death. The manufacture of Indurate required some ticklish work. As you know, we produced our halves of the formula separately. Physical contact with my half over a long period of time would prove fatal, I knew, and I simply neglected to so inform Ganeth-Klae.

  "But his ultimate death was a boomerang. With Klae gone, I could find no trace of his half of the formula. I was almost beside myself for a time. Then I thought of something. Klae had once said that the secret of his half of the formula lay in himself. A vague statement, to say the least. But I took the words at their face value and gambled that he meant them literally; that is, that his body itself contained the formula.

  "I tried everything: X-ray, chemical analysis of the skin. I even removed the cranial cap and examined the brain microscopically. All without result. Meanwhile the police were beginning to direct their suspicions toward me in the matter of Klae's disappearance.

  "You know the rest. It was necessary that I leave Earth at once and go beyond our system, beyond the jurisdiction of the planetary police. So I arranged this voyage with a sufficient complement of passengers to lessen the danger and hardship of a new life on a new world. I was still positive, however, that Klae's secret lay in his dead body. I took that body along, encased in the Martian preservative, solidifex.

  "It was my idea that I could continue my examination once we were safe on a strange planet But I had reckoned without Ganeth-Klae."

  "What do you mean?" I said slowly.

  "I said Klae was no fool. But I didn't know that with Martian stoicism he suspected the worst and took his own ironic means of combating it. He used the last lot of Indurate to make that booster, a device which he said would increase our take-off speed. He mounted it on the Marie Galante.

  "Mason, that device was no booster. It was a time machine, so devised as to catapult the ship not into outer space, but into the space-time continuum. It was a mechanism designed to throw the Marie Galante forward into the future."

  A cloud of fear began to well over me. "What do you mean?" I said again.