Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  Rhysling obliged, then said, “You youngsters have got it soft. Everything automatic. When I was twisting her tail you had to stay awake.”

  “You still have to stay awake.”

  They fell to talking shop, and Macdougal showed him the new direct-response damping rig which had replaced the manual vernier control that Rhysling had used. Rhysling felt out the controls and asked questions until he was familiar with the new installation. It was his conceit that he was still a jetman and that his present occupation as a troubadour was simply an expedient during one of the fusses with the company that any man could get into.

  “I see you still have the old hand-damping plates installed,” he remarked, his agile fingers flitting over the equipment.

  “All except the links. I unshipped them because they obscure the dials.”

  “You ought to have them shipped. You might need them.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think—”

  Rhysling never did find out what Macdougal thought, for it was at that moment the trouble tore loose. Macdougal caught it square, a blast of radioactivity that burned him down where he stood.

  Rhysling sensed what had happened. Automatic reflexes of old habit came out. He slapped the discover and rang the alarm to the control room simultaneously. Then he remembered the unshipped links. He had to grope until he found them, while trying to keep as low as he could to get maximum benefit from the baffles. Nothing but the links bothered him as to location. The place was as light to him as any place could be; he knew every spot, every control, the way he knew the keys of his accordion.

  “Power room! Power room! What’s the alarm?”

  “Stay out!” Rhysling shouted. “The place is ‘hot.’” He could feel it on his face and in his bones, like desert sunshine.

  The links he got into place, after cursing someone, anyone, for having failed to rack the wrench he needed. Then he commenced trying to reduce the trouble by hand. It was a long job and ticklish. Presently he decided that the jet would have to be spilled, pile and all.

  First he reported. “Control!”

  “Control aye aye!”

  “Spilling Jet Three—emergency.”

  “Is this Macdougal?”

  “Macdougal is dead. This is Rhysling, on watch. Stand by to record.”

  There was no answer; dumfounded the skipper may have been, but he could not interfere in a power-room emergency. He had the ship to consider, and the passengers and crew. The doors had to stay closed.

  The captain must have been still more surprised at what Rhysling sent for record. It was:

  We rot in the molds of Venus,

  We retch at her tainted breath.

  Foul are her flooded jungles,

  Crawling with unclean death.

  Rhysling went on cataloguing the Solar System as he worked, “harsh bright soil of Luna,” “Saturn’s rain-bow rings,” “the frozen night of Titan,” all the while opening and spilling the jet and fishing it clean. He finished with an alternate chorus:

  We’ve tried each spinning space mote

  And reckoned its true worth:

  Take us back again to the homes of men

  On the cool, green hills of Earth.

  Then, almost absentmindedly, he remembered to tack on his revised first verse:

  The arching sky is calling Spacemen back to their trade.

  All hands! Stand by! Free falling!

  And the lights below us fade.

  Out ride the sons of Terra,

  Far drives the thundering jet,

  Up leaps the race of Earthmen Out, far, and onward yet—

  The ship was safe now and ready to limp home, shy one jet. As for himself, Rhysling was not so sure. That “sunburn” seemed pretty sharp, he thought. He was unable to see the bright, rosy fog in which he worked, but he knew it was there. He went on with the business of flushing the air out through the outer valve, repeating it several times to permit the level of radioaction to drop to something a man might stand under suitable armor. While he did this, he sent one more chorus, the last bit of authentic Rhysling that ever could be:

  We pray for one last landing On the globe that gave us birth;

  Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies And the cool, green hills of Earth.

  Philip Wylie (1902- ) is Massachusetts born, but now lives in Florida. He has written many novels, but those done in collaboration with Edwin Balmer (When Worlds Collide, 1933; After Worlds Collide, 1934) have proved especially popular with science-fiction enthusiasts. His Night Unto Night (1945), however, won him an even larger audience in a under field. His books include Finnley Wrenn (1934), The Big Ones Get Away (1940), Salt Water Daffy (1941), The Other Horseman (1941), and a remarkable polemic, Generation of Vipers (1943), which has earned him. the title of “enfant terrible” of American letters. His most recent book is An Essay in Morals (1947).

  BLUNDER

  Philip Wylie

  THERE IS NO RECORD OF THE EXACT date. It was probably a morning in late May, or possibly in early June, when Carl Everson and Hugh Dunn rode up from the abandoned nickel mine on its creaky hoist and stood with their hands over their eyes, spreading their fingers apart slowly, to become accustomed to the outdoor brilliance. Late May or early June—since this was the latitude of the “midnight sun” and there had been no dark. Around the two men was an enormous clearing which stretched from a solid wall of spruces to boulders fringing the polar ocean; an expanse of weeds, birches, wild grass and young conifers gradually obliterating a village near the mine and steadily overgrowing high, rusty cones of tailings.

  Everson and Dunn had invested their life savings here. The region suited their needs; a mine in hard rock, deep enough, with extensive lateral galleries, close to the sea. Here, moreover, on a Pole-facing promontory of the North Cape, was utter isolation—necessary because some risk was involved in their work and they did not wish to endanger human beings. Indeed, the harming of a person would have ruined their purpose, which was essentially as commercial as it was scientific.

  Carl Everson held the Chair of Physics in the Oslo Institute; Hugh Dunn was Dean of Engineering at Glasgow, and a Nobel Laureate, besides. The scheme on which they had long plotted together was ingenious and, basically, quite simple.

  It depended upon two facts. First, that volcanic phenomena are radioactive in nature. Second, that certain types—the steam-producing types—are usable as a power source: at least one Italian city had drawn its electricity from steam that gushed out of a volcanic vent, since the 1920s. Everson and Dunn intended to disintegrate a bismuth “bomb” in the mine gallery in such a way as to start a slow, hot, atomic chain reaction. The process, according to their calculations, would not “burn out” for centuries and conjunction of the sea would guarantee production of superheated steam which, they believed, could be “harnessed.” As owners of such a source, the two scientists knew that they could furnish to all of northern Scandinavia, and much of Finland, extremely cheap electrical power. In doing so, they would make their fortunes.

  The venture had one unfavorable aspect: research in physics was sequestered by individual national governments. For many years, new information had been released only after the security authorities in the “nation-of-discovery” had assured themselves it was no longer, actually, “new.” Thus, scientific advances made in Britain, Russia, America, China and elsewhere were not always added to the body of common human knowledge but often retained as “military secrets.” Owing to that situation, Everson and Dunn had long argued the wisdom of carrying out their plan.

  “Bismuth fission,” the Norwegian had often said, “is something new under the sun. We’ll be the first to do it—maybe. We think we know what will happen. But are we sure? Evans is apparently working on it. Chandra Lalunal, at Delhi. And Stackpole. Maybe we’d better wait for their further reports. They’ve hinted at progress—”

  And the Scot would generally reply, “Aye. Wait. Wait how long? For the rest of our lives? Wait until generals and states
men decide the knowledge has leaked, or their spies have learnt it? Suppose we do fail, Carl? What then?”

  “Then we’ll jointly own a big puddle of hot rock that nobody can approach for centuries.”

  “Right.” The Scot would chuckle. “Right. And be the precious fools of physics, too! Well, get on with it, Carl. Fine times, these, for what they used to call a free man!”

  The times. The date. It was May or early June, but the year is not on the record, either. The vague monographs concerning bismuth fission, by Evans and Lalunal and Stackpole, had been published twenty-eight years after the first appalling rainbow of transmuted mass flashed onto (and into) the barrens of New Mexico, U. S. A. The famed “atomic bomb.” So the date was a springtime later than 1973. ’Seventy-four, perhaps. Everson and Dunn had offered a questioning paper, too, in the hope of getting more data for their experiment. But it had been held up by Norwegian censorship. That it had finally been released, and was even now in print, they could not know for they had camped in solitude for some weeks.

  They stood in the sunshine a moment—in the stillness—in the subarctic morning. The two men could see, now. They put out the miner’s lights on their hats and walked, quickly, through the grass, following a cable that snaked from the mine shaft.

  They came to a detonator and stood over it, reluctantly: a pair of tall thoughtful men—the Scot redheaded, the Norwegian blond as glass. Good men.

  “Touch it off,” the Scot said.

  “I hate to.”

  Dunn chuckled and rammed home the plunger. The mine shaft grunted repeatedly. Small shocks vibrated the weedy ground. A wisp of smoke—then a cloud—puffed out of the vertical bowel. The hoist dropped out of sight; the housing over it collaspsed. All down the deep intestine, dynamite exploded; its sides caved in and tumbled, blocking heavily the gallery in which a mechanism the size of a piano ticked and ticked, undisturbed by the choking of exit.

  “Done,” said Everson.

  They strode into the forest, following a path that was the remnant of a heavy-duty highway. The trucks of Norwegians, then Germans, then Russians, had rolled here long ago, hauling off nickel ore for the violent purposes of World War II. Everson, who was less sanguine than his colleague, contemplated a goldheaded fly that lighted on his Mackinaw. It was, he thought, a perfect creature—sterile as the northern woods, efficient as nature, germane to the region—which man had never been. Man had left the bleaching wreckage of the mine town and the corroded heaps of ore; the fly brought only a living goldness into this place, this sprucy fragrance, this green churchliness.

  Their car faced south. They removed its tarpaulin and drove, swiftly, to the main road. At an inn some fifty miles from the mine, they stopped and entered the dining room. Their waitress had long, silvery braids, and she let them fall invitingly over the shoulders of Hugh Dunn while he peered at the menu. But he did not notice. Everson, finally, translated the list of dishes and did the ordering; Dunn spoke Norwegian badly. This is usually so: the citizens of the weak countries learn the tongues of the stronger.

  Morning in Scandinavia was afternoon in India. Chandra Lalunal neither resisted nor resented the heat; he accepted it. He sat watching garden shadows stretch across a dry lawn and listening to the spatter of a fountain. The sound should have contributed psychological coolness; it failed; it made the young man think of the mammoth humidity which seemed to be the entire substance of the day. Chandra’s apartment was a unit in a file of one-story white buildings which quartered down a hill, parallel to a garden—the work of some landscape architect who had fancied the Ficus. These trees, with small leaves and great, standing tall and growing a tangle of root exposed in low, stalactite-crowded caves, all glittered alike in the hazy sunshine.

  Chandra could look over their tops, here and there, at the domes and spicules of the city and the square, huge walls of the government buildings. He sat in a doorway not because there was a breeze, but in case there might be one. Occasionally he turned a page of the newly arrived journal in his lap. It was called The International Physical Quarterly. Much of its text was printed not in words but in diagrams and mathematical symbols. His dark profile had a remarkable sharpness, so that, viewed from the side, it seemed akin to the keener animals. With a full-face view, however, this predatory look was overmastered by his eyes—bright, black and yet dreaming in subjective peace. His brown fingers turned another page.

  The eyes glanced down, held, changed shape minutely. “Inquiries into the Binding Fractions of Bismuth,” the article said. Its authors were known by reputation to the Indian: Carl Everson and Hugh Dunn. Chandra, also, had made some “inquiries” into the action of bismuth. Now, his brain commenced its common, human, utterly astonishing function. Words and symbols became electrical patterns within it; these took meaning, related to apparatus in Chandra’s own laboratory, represented similar pages of figures he had written, and spelled thoughts, concepts, actual experiments. An hypothesis, begun two generations before by a dead and greatly honored savant named Albert Einstein, was the starting place of the electronic panoply that informed the young man’s reading mind. Chandra checked, cross-checked, opened his lips to say an unsaid word of disapproval, and presently came to the end of the monograph.

  Now, he looked for some time at the gardens. Far away, the temples brayed—slat-ribbed priests riding on the bell ropes. Chandra did not notice. The Delhi plane slanted overhead, fast, quiet. He saw it—and did not see. At last he rose. He crossed the marble floor of his living room, picked up a white hand set, dialed. He asked for Lord Polt and, after a time, talked to him.

  “But it may be very important,” Chandra finally said. “I know it is late. But this is pressing, sir.”

  The other man changed his mind. Chandra presently drove his car through the heat walls and among the slow snarl of people to the government buildings.

  Lord Polt wanted to get into his air-conditioned home. He wanted tea. He wanted to change his linen. He wanted to forget the harangue he’d had that day from the leader of the Eastern Conference. He wanted to get out of the drab, damned, sweating institutional chamber where he rotted away his life. He wanted to go home to England . . . He said all that, pushing his tall bulkiness around despairfully behind his desk, wiping his sweated forehead with a white handkerchief, envying Chandra his appearance of dryness. He finally said, “What the devil is it, son?” Chandra put the periodical on the governor’s desk. “It is this.” Lord Polt looked at it and his vexation returned. “Talk sense, Chandra, for the love of heaven! ‘This’! What is it? Runes! Hieroglyphics!”

  “It’s got a mistake in it,” Chandra said. His voice belonged to his eyes. “A quite bad mistake.”

  The Englishman was too deeply exasperated now and, paradoxically, too fond of the young physicist, to maintain his damp vehemence. “You’ll have to do better than that, Chandra,” he said slowly. “A mistake? Thousands of you birds make millions of ’em. Are you asking me to correct the papers of a couple of Oslo and Glasgow chemists? I mean—what do you want?”

  “I want,” Chandra answered, “to have you requisition the world network, at once. Tonight. For at least an hour. I would like to be put on the air to explain this—error in mathematics.” Lord Polt’s eyes bulged. “Are you mad, son? The world—I”

  “It is a most hazardous mistake. Time shouldn’t be lost. There may be much time. Years. But there may be no time at all.”

  “Time, in the name of the Eternal, for what?”

  “To prevent any accident.” Chandra smiled slightly. “In the name of the Eternal, as you say, sir.”

  A choleric disposition was not the reason for which the Foreign Office had sent Lord Polt to India; he had brains. He said, after a moment, “See here, Chandra. If this mistake is so important, how’d the Board miss it? How does it come to be in print?”

  The dark youth showed his teeth; only a man who knew Indians well would have understood it was more than an easy smile. “There are branches of mathematics and of physical
research which are pursued by a few people only. Branches which have been thoroughly investigated and abandoned, long ago. This is one. Besides—even with mathematics, it is possible to—to-”

  “Dissemble?” The man’s head nodded.

  “—to publish papers which would mean one thing to most scientists—and a little more, perhaps, to a few others.” Chandra sighed. “That is another reason why it is sad—and vain—to imagine that science can be searched, censored and deleted—like soldiers’ mail.”

  They were silent. The Englishman used his handkerchief again. “Chandra, the heat’s affected you. It would require an emergency order from London to get the world network tonight. Or any night. I couldn’t ask it, to let you lecture on physics. And even if I could, whatever you want to say would have to be reviewed first by the Board. You know that. The Board is two years behind. Censoring your stuff is difficult—”

  “I assure you, sir, the peril is—is of a magnitude—”

  Lord Polt was annoyed again. “The devil with the peril! People in your business have gone around muttering about peril for thirty years! Send your blasted corrections through channels!” For a long moment, the liquid Indian eyes rested upon the bright blue eyes. Dark eyes—fatigued with subjugation, fatalistic, fatal. Then Chandra said, “I’m sorry I troubled you, sir. Perhaps it isn’t urgent.”

  The governor nodded. “You’re on the ragged side. Take a week off, son. Go up in the hills. If your school president’s sticky about it, phone me.”

  Chandra thanked him.

  He went back to his apartment and sat, again in the doorway, looking at the many kinds of Ficus trees and their increasing shadows . . .

  Stackpole—Jeffry Stackpole, of Atlanta, Georgia, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now, and for a long time, far from home—learned of the blunder in the Everson-Dunn equations from a subordinate. Stackpole was chief engineer of Plant Number 5, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Uranium Works. His subordinate, Plummer, knocked and entered his office without waiting. He had The International Physical Quarterly in his hand. Plummer was fresh from the States—recently a good quarterback but now a better nuclear physicist—and what he had discovered amused him.