Element 79

by Fred Hoyle

  The following day the rather attractive young man who was handling the matter “from the other side” told Polly, in the strictest confidence, that he saw no prospect of support being withdrawn if she could see her way to affording the wealthy backer a few slight favors, in fact, a weekend of slight favors. The backer, he said, was a splendid, jolly fellow, generous and openhanded, humorous and gay, indeed, a girl could do worse.

  Polly, in her innocence, had been deceived before, but always by verbal promises, never after an actual contract had been signed. She was now of a divided mind. In the past she had given of her person without receiving the promised reward. Was it sensible to stint a wealthy backer who surely must produce a real reward? On the other hand, once bitten, twice shy. Polly was suspicious now about all men and their motives. In a divided mind, she went to see the older girl, the girl from her hometown. The older girl told her the people she was dealing with had a “good name in the business.” As for the wealthy backer, what of it? Wasn’t it done every day? She’d be a little fool to pass up such an opportunity.

  So it came about that Polly agreed to meet her backer, for a weekend’s assignment at a pleasant house on the best of the City’s beaches.

  The Devil, our own terrestrial Devil, turned up for the assignment in a well-groomed condition. He turned up in human shape, for there was no point in frightening the girl out of her wits, not right at the beginning. For the first hour or so Polly was nervous, but the Devil’s conversation was so well judged to the level of her intellect that soon she felt quite at her ease. She didn’t like to drink too much in the circumstances, of course. When the Devil pressed her in a jocular way, she accepted “a small one.” In volume it may have been small. In impact it had a mule’s kick.

  The Devil then went about his business with a characteristic skill and efficiency. In a flash he had the clothes off the girl, burned to a cinder, they were, and without harming the girl. She giggled as he tumbled her into bed. She giggled louder and louder as the affair prospered. Indeed, it suddenly occurred to the Devil how very very warm this girl was, temperature-wise. Her nether quarters were heating up far too much for his liking. It was all a little like the outburst of some enormous star, a supernova, up to fantastic temperatures in the twinkling of an eye. The girl had him now in an iron grip, just where he could least afford an iron grip. Too late, the Devil realized he’d been tricked. It had all been done in the drink, the replacement of Polly Warburg by this ultraviolet-hot she-bitch. He knew exactly who had planned it, α Serp, of course, the Dean of Devils.

  There was just time for the Devil to regret bitterly his decision to come in human shape before the thing went beyond all bounds. With the shriek of a tornado, he broke the iron grip. His momentum took him out through the house window. To cool off a bit, he drove himself like a mighty blast through the air, his lower quarters aglow like the jet of a rocket. Hollering and screaming, he careered like a jumping firecracker over the thronged streets and boulevards of the city of his creation. People looked up in wonderment, thinking there was no telling where progress would lead to next.

  Polly Warburg saw nothing of all this, the real Polly, for she awoke only some hours later, to find herself sleeping in the old bed in the old house in the old hometown. She had no memory of what had happened in Slippage City. Nor was she aware that they’d better like it hot, the folks on α Serpentis.

  The Ax

  The weather was good, the skies clear, the air temperature not too high for uphill walking. A party of four young people, two men and two girls, approached the top of the mountain. The summit cairn was already tenanted by a brown-faced man, who seemed almost infinitely old to those young people. They passed the time of day, and the brown-faced man made the obvious joke about getting himself a lady companion. Then he set off down the gently sloping northern side, leaving the young people to laugh at a still better joke—the ice ax dangling across his back. Was the old boy really expecting snow in the middle of the summer?

  Soon the young people were running down the same northern side of the mountain. It was good going, so they made a fast pace, gaining ground on the old man. Five hundred feet down from the summit, a subsidiary, twisting rocky ridge branched off to the right. It led down through the northern cliffs to the floor of the magnificent corrie below. It was not a difficult route by real climbing standards, but it needed constant care. The young people, as they charged down the more gentle upper slopes, were surprised to see the old man turn off the easier main ridge onto the subsidiary ridge. This was the route they intended to take themselves.

  The brown-faced man was not more than a hundred feet below them when they started down the first broken rocks. They expected to catch him very quickly, but this was not what happened. Steadily, the gap between the solitary man and the twenty-year-olds opened up. The rougher the descent, the more the old man went ahead. He was using the ice ax skillfully, using it to save his legs from the jarring of the multitude of awkward downward steps. Year by year the legs accumulate small, irreparable damage to ligaments and cartilage, damage which the body cannot repair. Old legs, like old trees, carry the total debit of accidental damage taken over a whole lifetime. With the aid of his ax, the old man had learned to overcome something of this inevitable handicap, giving his superb natural balance an opportunity to show itself. An observer would have seen four healthy youngsters letting themselves carefully down little rock walls, down bits of scree and steep grass. He would also have seen the old man forging ahead of them, moving smoothly and gracefully, apparently without haste, in the style of the true mountaineer.

  The youngsters didn’t laugh at the sight of the ax when they came for a second time on the brown-faced man. He was sitting beside the lochan that nestled in the floor of the corrie. He’d been sitting there for perhaps twenty minutes, watching them, munching bits of chocolate mixed together with an apple. He offered them some of the chocolate and they were not embarrassed to accept it, as they would have been if he had offered it at the cairn at the top. Then they were off along the path at a good clip, anxious to do the six miles back to the nearest village before the shops closed for the day.

  The old man stayed on long after the young people had gone. He sat in the afternoon sunshine, not because he was tired, but because he was in no hurry. It was a curious thing, as he had grown older he had got less tired, not more tired. Tweaks and twinges, yes, tired legs, no. The last time he had felt really tired was so far back in the past that he couldn’t even bring it to mind. Where age showed itself, he thought wryly, was in his attitude to discomfort. He could face rain, wind, or blizzard with the same determination he’d always had, but unnecessary discomfort made him acutely miserable. It made him miserable to eat a bad dinner when he could get a good one, to sleep in an uncomfortable bed when a comfortable one was available, to stump ten miles along a hard road when he could ride in a car.

  The ax was standing upright a few yards away, where he had stabbed it into soft ground. It was strong and light, beautifully made and, like himself, it was old. The ax had been given to him many years ago by an Italian mountaineer, a pioneer in South America. How many places had it stood as it was standing now? On first ascents in the Andes, on many an Alpine peak.

  It was almost fifteen years since the day on the Obergabelhorn. With a guide, he had traversed the Weisshorn, descending the Schaligrat. The following day they had set out for the traverse of the Wellenkuppe and the Obergabelhorn. It was all perfectly straightforward. They had crossed the summit of the Wellenkuppe to the Great Gendarme. After the Gendarme they came to the steepening rocks of the Obergabelhorn itself. From here on, the climb was essentially on rock, so he had stopped to put the ax head safely into his rucksack—that was before rucksacks were made with special loops at the top and bottom for fastening an ax. The guide had been impatient with him for stopping. Couldn’t he wedge the ax into the rucksack straps in the same way the guide himself had done? He had tried it, but during the climb there came a moment when he
was forced to stoop and the ax had slipped out. It dropped on to an exceedingly steep snowslope flanking the ridge on which they were climbing. He had watched it slide with increasing speed, down toward the glacier thousands of feet below. Then it happened in a flash. The ax took a bounce, upended itself, and miraculously dug its point deep into a snowy ledge. There it stuck, standing upright, just as it was doing now.

  He told the guide he was going down to retrieve it, but the guide said no, the slope was far too steep. They had argued, both determined men. To him, there was no question of leaving the ax. If it had gone down to the glacier, all very well. He would have written it off. But it hadn’t. It had stopped. It was holding itself up, waiting to be fetched.

  To the Swiss, this was a case of insanity. The route ahead to the summit of the Obergabelhorn was a rock climb, as also was the descent by the Arbengrat. An ax was almost superfluous from here on. Certainly there was no danger in going on. Equally certain, there was danger in attempting to retrieve the ax which his client had been fool enough to drop.

  So they had argued, one in English, one in German, not able to understand each other very well. At last the Englishman had told the guide to fix his own price for the retrieval of the ax, but retrieved it was going to be, even if he had to go alone for it. This changed the situation, for a guide is paid to risk his life in his client’s interest.

  The guide had lowered the Englishman on a two-hundred-foot rope. Then the guide had climbed down to him in his steps, and they had again run out the rope. This brought him off the horribly steep part of the slope, to the ledges where the ax had fastened itself. With the ax, now, getting back to the ridge had not been impossibly difficult. Details of the rest of the traverse were almost lost from memory.

  The guide had more than doubled his tariff for the day. The old man still remembered the two hundred francs he had paid over. A lot for an ax, but then it had been impossible to leave it, with its hand outstretched to him like that.

  With a sigh, the brown-faced man got to his feet, slipped the ax through the special loop in his rucksack, and started down the track from the lochan to the lower valley.

  Agent 38

  An agent’s job is a lonely one. Agent Number 38 Zone 11 reflected so as he worked over his report for perhaps the twentieth time. He hadn’t even a decent name to be known by. Just Number 38 of Zone 11, nothing more. It was irritating, degrading almost.

  Reports of U.F.O.s (Unidentified Flying Objects) were of course commonplace, had been for twenty years. To allay public anxiety, an official inquiry had been necessary—that would be about ten years ago. The findings weren’t too well received in some quarters. A lot of witnesses had been judged to be irresponsible publicity-seekers. Liars, in fact. And the more honest ones had been put down as victims of anxiety complexes. This had been Agent 38’s own opinion at the time. A bunch of psychotic characters. How could objects whiz through the atmosphere, or whiz along outside the atmosphere, at the fantastic speeds that had been claimed? The accelerations would kill you in a moment.

  According to the big boys, the way an anxiety complex works is this. You’re all hotted up inside about something or other. You can’t find any outlet for your bottled emotions in the real world. So you invent a phantom world. You force yourself to see things and hear things—U.F.O.s, in fact. In short, you go crazy.

  Agent 38 could well believe he was suffering from an anxiety complex. Who wouldn’t be after the troubles of the last few years? But how, in his case, could spotting a U.F.O. be of the slightest help to a bottled-up psychosis? So far from helping, it would be a disastrous end to his career. Perhaps he should suppress his report? Oh, to hell with it! He’d been over that possibility a hundred times before, and a hundred times he’d rejected it. His whole training was against it—suppressing a report was one of the things one just did not do.

  Of course, his report would have one unusual feature to distinguish it. He hadn’t merely spotted the U.F.O., he’d detected an electromagnetic transmission from it—in an unusual part of the wave band, too. Agent 38 couldn’t understand why anyone should want to transmit at such a short wavelength. But after all, that wasn’t his business. His business was to send out his report.

  The transmission had obviously been coded. Although he himself hadn’t been able to decipher it, perhaps the big bugs might be able to do so. Then perhaps they wouldn’t think he was crazy. But the chances were they’d fail, just as he himself had failed. Which would put him in a tough spot. They’d think he’d invented the whole thing. They’d say that his psychosis was very very bad. He’d be moved immediately to some quiet place for recuperation.

  Well, perhaps that wouldn’t be so unpleasant after all. Perhaps deep down in himself that was what he really wanted. Perhaps that was the reason for his psychosis.

  Dave Johnson looked out of the starboard porthole. There were four of them in the spaceship: Bill Harrison, Chris Yolantis, Stu Fieldman, and himself. This was the end of the line, the end of hard, unremitting training. But there were some things you could train for, and there were others you couldn’t. Take the silence, for instance, the strange, gliding silence. It made you aware of all the little noises you could hear on Earth, even in places that were supposed to be dead quiet. For the first two weeks they’d played records and they’d talked incessantly. But then they’d come to realize they were talking simply to shut out the silence. After that it had seemed somehow better to accept the silence. So there were no long speeches anymore. Most of what they said now was in terse Anglo-Saxon.

  Dave doubted that any of them had really recovered from the beginning. Once the shattering effect of the starting blast had worn off, they’d watched the bright ball of the Earth recede away from them. At first it had filled almost half the sky. But day after day it had become smaller and smaller. Now it was a mere point, like Mars or Jupiter. This was the terrible morale destroyer—watching your home receding implacably to huge, pitiless distances. You knew that out there, nearly forty million miles away, people were going about their daily lives—kids to school, commuters to work, housewives busying themselves, cars on the highways, hamburger stands. You knew it, but you couldn’t believe it.

  Soon another planet would be filling their sky. On paper everything was easy. They were to enter the atmosphere of Venus, brake down, descend below the white clouds, and then fly several times around. There wasn’t to be a landing, because the scientists were quite certain Venus was covered entirely by ocean. Then they’d simply blast off again and return to Earth.

  It was difficult to see where anything could go wrong. The reentry problem into the Earth’s atmosphere had been solved years ago—they themselves had made four flights out from Earth during training. And entry into the Venusian atmosphere should be no different in principle from the case of Earth. The host of space vehicles encircling Venus over the past two decades had shown quite conclusively that the atmosphere contained nothing but harmless gases—nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water.

  Dave wondered just how far the ideas of the scientists would hold up. The clouds through which the spaceship must soon penetrate were thought to be merely frozen crystals of carbon dioxide—cirrus clouds of dry ice, in fact. But suppose the scientists were wrong. Suppose the clouds continued unbroken right down to the ocean surface. Suppose the oceans were boiling.

  The blast-off from Venus would be controlled by radio transmitters on Earth. This was one comfort, at least. It would insure that the ship accelerated into the right orbit for the home trip. They themselves would be down under the Venusian clouds, unable to see out into space, certainly unable to choose the proper homeward trajectory. In fact, at any moment the people back home could take over control of the ship—a precaution just in case they all went crazy.

  The spaceship began to bite into the atmosphere of Venus. The finlike wings began to be operated by the gas pressure outside.

  Inside the ship, now that the long wait was over, the crew became rational and active. These were
critical moments. Harrison, chief pilot, took over at the control panel.

  “This is it boys,” he growled. “This is what we came for.”

  They watched the speed indicator—down, down, always down. When the pointer reached half the initial entry reading, triumphantly they knew the rest was easy. It was only a matter of minutes now.

  Then they were down to cruising speed, twelve hundred miles per hour. Harrison adjusted the powerful motors—it needed little more than the idling rate to keep the speed steady, for the ship was held up now by aerodynamic lift from the gases through which it was moving, like an ordinary airplane.

  The clouds below them appeared quite fantastically bright, far brighter than terrestrial clouds. The radio altimeter showed they were fifteen miles above the surface of the planet. Harrison set the ship in a gentle downward glide.

  Thirteen miles up… eleven miles… into the clouds themselves. All eyes on the altimeter now. Dave knew just what the others were thinking: “Pray to Christ the thing is still okay.” He noticed the temperature gauge—minus 75°C. outside—so low, the ship must still be high above the surface. The altimeter was okay.

  Slowly the light intensity decreased. Nine miles up now. At seven miles they came suddenly out of the glaring white wall of cloud, to find that it was all fantastically similar to Earth—the blue glow below them caused by molecular scattering, the unbroken clouds far down there, probably water clouds lying over an ocean. There was one queer thing, though. The light was just about as bright as a clear sunlit day on Earth. But there was no sun here. For the sun was hidden now by the carbon dioxide clouds above them.