All were descendants of a mixed race with Latin, Semitic, Hamitic and negroid ancestry: a race that had dwelt, before the sun’s cooling, in countries south of the Mediterranean, where th6 former deserts had been rendered fertile by a vast irrigation-system of lakes and canals.
This mixture, after so many centuries of cavern life, had produced a characteristically slender, well-knit type, of short or medium stature and pale olive complexion. The features were often of negroid softness; the general physique marked by a delicacy verging upon decadence.
To an extent surprising, in view of the vast intermediate eras of historic and geographic change, this people had preserved many pre-atomic traditions and even something of the old classic Mediterranean cultures. Their language bore distinct traces of Latin, Greek, Spanish and Arabic.
Remnants of other peoples, those of sub-equatorial Asia and America, had survived the universal glaciation by burrowing underground. Radio communication had been maintained with these peoples till within fairly recent times, and had then ceased. It was believed that they had died put, or had retrograded into savagery, losing the civilization to which they had once attained.
Hour after hour, intervaled only by sleep and eating, the Phosphor sped onward through the black unvarying void. To Hilar, it seemed at times that they Hew merely through a darker and vaster cavern whose remote walls were spangled by the stars as if by radiant orbs. He had thought to feel the overwhelming vertigo of unbottomed and undirectioned space. Instead, there was a weird sense of circumscription by the ambient night and emptiness, together with a sense of cyclic repetition, as if all that was happening had happened many times before and must recur often through endless future kalpas.
Had he and his companions gone forth in former cycles to the relighting of former perished suns? Would they go forth again, to rekindle suns that would flame and die in some posterior universe? Had there always been, would there always be, a Rodis who awaited his return?
Of these thoughts he spoke only to Han Joas, who shared something of his innate mysticism and his trend toward cosmic speculation. But mostly the two talked of the mysteries of the atom and its typhonic powers, and discussed the problems with which they would shortly be confronted.
The ship carried several hundred disruption bombs, many of untried potency: the unused heritage of ancient wars that had left chasm scars and lethal radioactive areas, some a thousand miles or more in extent, for the planetary glaciers to cover. There were bombs, of iron,calcium, sodium, helium, hydrogen, "sulphur, potassium, magnesium, copper, chromium, strontium, barium, zinc: elements that had all been anciently revealed in the solar spectrum. Even at the apex of their madness, the warring nations had wisely refrained from employing more than a few such bombs at any one time.
Chain-reactions had sometimes been started; but, fortunately, had died out.
Hilar and Han Joas hoped to distribute the bombs at intervals over the sun’s entire circumference; preferably in large deposits of the same elements as those of which they were composed. The vessel was equipped with radar apparatus by which the various elements could be detected and located. The bombs would be timed to explode with as much simultaneity as possible. If all went well, the Phosphor would have fulfilled its mission and traveled most of the return distance to earth before the explosions occurred.
It had been conjectured that the sun’s interior was composed of still-molten magma, covered by a relatively thin crust: a seething flux of matter that manifested itself in volcanic activities. Only one of the volcanoes was visible from earth to the naked eye; but numerous others had been revealed to telescopic study. Now, as the Phosphor drew near to its destination, these others flamed out on the huge, slowly rotating orb that had darkened a fourth of the ecliptic and had blotted Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius wholly from view.
For a long time it had seemed to hang above the voyagers. Now, suddenly, as if through some prodigious legerdemain, it lay beneath them: a monstrous, ever-broadening disk of ebon, eyed with fiery craters, veined and spotted and blotched with unknown pallid radioactives. It was like the buckler of some macrocosmic giant of the night, who had entrenched himself in the abyss lying between the worlds.
The Phosphor plunged toward it like a steel splinter drawn by some tremendous lodestone.
Each member of the crew had been trained before-hand for the part he was to play; and everything had been timed with the utmost precision. Sybal and Samac, the engineers of the anti-gravity magnets, began to manipulate the switches that would build up resistance to the solar drag. The generators, bulking to the height of three men, with induction-coils that suggested some colossal Laocoon, could draw from cosmic space a negative force capable of counteracting many earth-gravities. In past ages they had defied easily the pull of Jupiter; and the ship had even coasted as near to the blazing sun as its insulation and refrigeration systems would safely permit. Therefore it seemed reasonable to expect that the voyagers could accomplish their purpose of approaching closely to the darkened globe,7 of circling it, and pulling away when the disruption-charges had all been planted.
A dull, subsonic vibration, felt rather than heard, began to emanate from the magnets. It shook the vessel, ached in the voyagers’ tissues. Intently, with anxiety unbetrayed by their impassive features, they watched the slow, gradual building-up of power shown by gauge-dials on which giant needles crept like horologic hands, registering the reversed gravities one after one, till a drag equivalent to that of fifteen Earths had been neutralized. The clamp of the solar gravitation, drawing them on with projectile-like velocity, crushing them to their seats with relentless increase of weight, was loosened. Hie needles crept on . . . more slowly now ... to sixteen . . . to seventeen . . . and stopped. The Phosphor's fall had been retarded but not arrested. And the switches stood at their last notch.
Sybal spoke, in answer to the unuttered questions of his companions.
“Something is-wrong. Perhaps there has been some unforeseen deterioration of the coils, in whose composition strange and complex alloys were used. Some of the elements may have been unstable—or have developed instability through age. Or perhaps there is some interfering unknown force, born of the sun’s decay. At any rate, it is impossible to build more power toward the twenty-seven anti-gravities we will require close to the solar surface.”
Samac added: “The decelerative jets will increase our resistance to nineteen anti-gravities. It will still be far from enough, even at our present distance.”
“How much time have we?” inquired Hilar, turning to the navigators, Calaf and Caramod.
The two conferred and calculated.
“By using the decelerative jets, it will be two hours before we reach the sun,” announced Calaf finally.
As if his announcement had been an order, Eibano, the jet-engineer, promptly jerked the levers that fired to full power the reversing rockets banked in the Phosphors nose and sides. There was a slight further deceleration of their descent, a further lightening of the grievous weight that oppressed them. But the Phosphor still plunged irreversibly sunward.
Hilar and Han Joas exchanged a glance of understanding and agreement. They rose stiffly from their seats, and moved heavily toward the magazine, occupying fully half the ship’s interior, in which the hundreds of disruption-bombs were racked. It was unnecessary to announce their purpose; and no one spoke either in approval or demur.
Hilar opened the magazine’s door; and he and Han Joas paused on the threshold, looking back. They saw for the last time the faces of their fellow-voyagers, expressing no other emotion than resignation, vignetted, as it were, on the. verge of destruction. Then they entered the magazine, closing its door behind them.
They set to work methodically, moving back to back along a narrow aisle between the racks in which the immense ovoid bombs were piled in strict order according to their respective elements. Because of the various coordinated dials and switches involved, it was a matter of minutes to prepare a single bomb for the explosi
on. Therefore, Hilar and Han Joas, in the time at their disposal, could do no more than set the timing and detonating mechanism of one bomb of each element. A great chronometer, ticking at the magazine’s farther end, enabled them to accomplish this task with precision. The bombs were thus timed to explode simultaneously, detonating the others through chain-reaction, at the moment when the Phosphor should touch the sun’s surface.
The solar pull, strengthening as the Phosphor fell to its doom, had now made their movements slow and difficult. It would, they feared, immobilize them before they could finish preparing a second series of bombs for detonation. Laboriously, beneath the burden of a weight already trebled, they made their way to seats that faced a reflector in which the external cosmos was imaged.
It was an awesome and stupendous scene on which they gazed. The sun’s globe had broadened vastly, filling the nether heavens. Half-seen, a dim unhorizoned landscape, fitfully lit by the crimson far-sundered flares of volcanoes, by bluish zones and patches of strange radio-active minerals, it deepened beneath them abysmally disclosing mountains that would have made the Himalayas seem like hillocks, revealing chasms that might have engulfed asteroids and planets.
At the center of this Cyclopean landscape burned the great volcano that had been called Hephaestus by astronomers. It was the same volcano watched by Hilar and Rodis from the observatory window. Tongues of flame a hundred miles in length arose and licked skyward from a crater that seemed the mouth of some ultramundane hell.
Hilar and Han Joas no longer heard the chronometer’s portentous ticking, and had no eyes for the watching of its ominous hands. Such watching was needless now: there was nothing more to be done, and nothing before them but eternity. They measured their descent by the broadening of the dim solar plain, the leaping into salience of new mountains, the deepening of new chasms and gulfs in the globe that had now lost all semblance of a sphere.
It was plain now that the Phosphor would fall directly into the flaming and yawning crater of Hephaestus. Faster and faster it plunged, heavier grew the piled chains of gravity that giants could not have lifted.
At the very last, the reflector on which Hilar and Han Joas peered was filled entirely by the tongued volcanic fires that enveloped the Phosphor.
Then, without eyes to see or ears to apprehend, they were part of the pyre from which the sun, like a Phoenix, was reborn.
Rodis, climbing to the tower, after a period of fitful sleep and troublous dreams, saw from its window the rising of die rekindled orb.
It dazzled her, though its glory was half-dimmed by rain-bow-colored mists that fumed from the icy mountain-tops. It was a sight filled with marvel and with portent. Thin rills of downward threading water had already begun to fret the glacial armor on slopes and scarps; and later they would swell to cataracts, laying bare the buried soil and stone. Vapors, that seemed to flow and fluctuate on renascent winds, swam sunward from lakes of congealed air at the valley’s bottom. It was a visible resumption of the elemental life and activity so long suspended in hibernal night. Even through the-tower’s insulating walls, Rodis felt the solar warmth that later would awaken the seeds and spores of plants that had lain dormant for cycles.
Her heart was stirred to wonder by the spectacle. But beneath the wonder was a great numbness and a sadness like unmelting ice. Hilar, she knew, would never return to her— except as a ray of the light, a spark of the vital heat, that he had helped to relumine. For the nonce, there was irony rather than comfort in the memory of his promise: “I will come back to you—in the sunlight.”
BUTCH
Paul Anderson
Like everybody else, I read about the Nova Scotia Meteor with some interest, though I’ll admit my first thought was what a pity that it had plunged' unrecoverably into the Atlantic. Anything big enough to produce that much fire and noise would have been of real scientific value. It was Valerie who pointed out to me the farms and towns and people on which it had not fallen. Then we forgot about it
A few days later, the papers were full of stories about the Bangor Monster. You remember the terror for a week in eastern Maine: two men and a boy found dead in lonely places, and any number of dogs and cows, apparently slashed by knife-like claws; unidentifiable pad marks around the bodies, which could only have been made by something walking on two feet; stories of the thing glimpsed, stories of the thing chasing people, ten thousand conflicting stories and descriptions over the whole east coast; state police everywhere, reporters everywhere, the Thing (capitalized by now) everywhere simultaneously. As usual, whatever facts there might be were soon buried under the hysteria and the publicity-seeking lies. Then the sudden blackout of news, the story buried in back pages, psychologists talking pompous nonsense about mass hallucination, and oblivion. Pretty soon we forgot about that too.
It was a couple of months later when I came home, one of those raw, sleety evenings you get in the" Chicago winter, and found that we had a visitor. I opened the door of our apartment, thinking mostly about supper, a hot Scotch and lemon, pipe and slippers and our newly acquired Beethoven Ninth.
Valerie met me, and I greeted her in detail. Even after two .years of marriage, you don’t get tired of a vivacious, imaginative little blonde whose figure is best described by making sine waves with the hands. She can also cook.
“Bob—” she said. “Bob, my new hairdo—hey, there!—oh, well . . . mmmm . . .” Pulling free: “Take it easy, caveman. We’ve got company.”
“Oh?” I went past her into the living room. Doc Urquhart was sitting under the View of Toledo, a short, round, shockheaded figure I hadn’t seen for four years now. “Well, I’ll be damned!”
| “Quite probably,” said Valerie.
Doc got up and pumped my hand. We’d become acquainted during the war, when he was the medical man finding out just what a human pilot can stand and I was the engineer explaining to him why the pilot would have to stand a little bit more than that, and had kept up the friendship since. “Nice to see you,'**' I said, and meant it. “But why the deuce didn’t you let us know you were coming? We’d’ve arranged—”
I realized suddenly how grave his face was, and broke off. For a moment there was silence.
“It’s business, Bob,” he said at last. “I want to offer you a job.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got one,” I answered.
“Can you get leave from it?”
“Why—well—what do you want me for?”
Doc shook his tangled gray head. “Can’t tell you that. Not here. But you’ve never worked on anything more important.” “I assure you, Dr. Urquhart, there are no Russians under the sofa taking.notes,” said Valerie.
“Sorry, Mrs. Muir. This, well, I just can’t talk about it. In fact, I'll have to ask you not to mention that I’ve been here or that Bob has been co-opted.” ,
“If I’ve been,” I said, annoyed.
“Look, Bob,” said Doc, “you know me better than that. Here’s the deal. We need a man like you. And I recommended you personally. Luckily, you’re working with classified data at the moment, so your FBI clearance* is already good. But your wife hasn’t been cleared. We want you as a—a consultant. Top pay, and the work is, well, it’s the sort of thing you’d pay to get in on. Shouldn’t take too long, about six weeks maybe. I came out to interview you personally and see if you qualify. Talking with your wife has convinced me that you do.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said lamely.
Doe switched the conversation, and we had a pleasant evening, the sort of bull session that had lasted till dawn in my bachelor days. In the end, of course, I agreed to his offer. Two days later, we were in a taxi bound for the airport and a special plane.
“Now can you tell me what the job is?” I asked.
* “Not till we’re in the air,” he replied. “But I’ll tell you why you qualify for it...”
“Go ahead.”
“I noticed that you still read science-fiction.”
As it turned out, the plan
e was an Air Force speedster with a taciturn young crew. That didn’t make me feel important somehow; instead, I had the sudden idea I was a very small fly caught in a very large machine. “Where are we bound?”
I asked humbly.
“The Danton Institute. Ifs a mental hospital-in up-state' New York.” Doc got his pipe going and blew moody blue clouds.
“And what are we going to do there?”
“We’re part of a sanity commission.”
"Huh?"
“We have to decide on the sanity of a being from outer space.”
The Danton Institute had been picked largely because of its isolation. It lay, in the rolling hills above the Hudson valley, with a couple of hundred acres of lawn and park around it; once it had been a millionaire’s estate. The nearest town was a village ten miles off, otherwise there were only scattered farms. A high stone wall surrounded the main house, which had been the mansion and about which smaller outbuildings had mushroomed. On the whole, it must have been pleasant enough, with an exclusive and expensive clientele. These had all been moved elsewhere,’ and now the Institute looked more like an armed camp. Sentries stood at the approaches, sentries patrolled the - walls, jeeps and half-tracks and a few light tanks squatted with bored-looking drivers always waiting nearby, helicopters were parked in the rear, soldiers had turned the dormitories into barracks, soldiers and important-looking civilians moved in and out of the big house—“Judas priest!” I said. “All for one alien?”
“If you remember your science-fiction,” said Doc, “this alien may at any instant start pulling men apart by telekinesis. Or he may decide he doesn’t like us and take it on the lam for Russia—with all his knowledge. Or he may call up the Kremlin by telepathy and get a paratroop brigade sent to haul him out of here.”
Time to Come Page 3