Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  “We’re dumb!” Jack stated with sudden vehemence. “He’s badly hurt, but that’s not all. This atmosphere is six times too dense for him. He’s smothering in it—drowning! We’ve got to get him somewhere where the pressure won’t be crushing him!”

  “We’ll rig up a vacuum tank down in the engine shed,” said Doctor Waters. “It won’t take but a minute.”

  It was done. However, when they were lifting Old Faithful onto the litter they had improvised, his body stiffened, shuddered, and grew suddenly limp. They knew that Old Faithful—Number 774—was gone. Still, to aid the remote possibility that he would revive, they placed him in the vacuum tank and exhausted most of the air so that the pressure inside duplicated that of the rarefied Martian atmosphere. Fresh air was admitted slowly through the petcock. But within an hour Old Faithful’s flesh had become stiff with rigor mortis. He was dead.

  Much must have passed through the devious channels of his Martian mind during those brief hours on Planet Three. He must have felt satisfied that his eagerness to penetrate the unknown was partly rewarded, his ambition partly fulfilled. He had learned what lay back of, and what had guided, the flickerings of the light. He had seen the people of Planet Three. Perhaps, at the last, he had thought of Mars, his home, and the sorry plight of his race.

  Maybe he thought of his growing offspring in that buried nursery chamber, fifty million miles away. Maybe the possibilities of Earth, as a means of aiding dying Mars, occurred to him, if it had not come into his mind before, and it is quite likely that his ideas in that direction were not altogether altruistic toward mankind.

  Certainly he hoped that his friend of the light would find his space car and what it contained, out there in the desert, and that they would study and understand.

  Dawn came, with the eastern sky sprinkled with a few pink feathery clouds that the bright sun would soon dissipate.

  In one of the various corrugated iron sheds of the camp, Yvonne, Jack, and the doctor were bending over the body of Old Faithful, which lay stiff and lifeless on a long table.

  “Kind of heartless to be preparing this intelligent being for immersion in a preservative spirit bath so that a lot of curious museum-goers can have a thrill, don’t you think, folks?” Jack was complaining with make-believe gruffness. “How would you like it if the situation was reversed—if we were stiffs with the curious of Mars looking at us?”

  “I wouldn’t mind if I was dead.” The girl laughed. “It would be an honor. Oh, look, Jack—the funny little mark on Old Faithful’s skin—it’s tattooed with red ink. What do you suppose it means?”

  Jack had already seen the mark. It was a circle with a bar through the center and was, as the girl had said, an artificial decoration or symbol. Jack shrugged. “Search me, honey!” He chuckled. “Say, doc, do you suppose that space car is around here somewhere?”

  The doctor nodded. “It must be.”

  “Well, come on! Let’s look for it, then! This can wait.”

  After a very hasty and sketchy breakfast, they made their way on horseback out into the desert, following the tracks the Martian robot had made.

  At the summit of a rocky ridge they found what they sought—a long cylinder of metal deeply imbedded in sand that seemed literally to have splashed like soft mud around it. The long fins of the space car were crumpled and broken and covered with the blue-gray ash of oxidation. Here and there a fragment had peeled away, revealing bright metal beneath.

  The nose of the shell had become unscrewed, exposing burnished threads that glistened in the sun. Into the shadowed interior they made their way, rummaging gingerly among the bewildering maze of Martian instruments. The place reeked with a scorched, pungent odor.

  At the rear of the cylindrical compartment they found a great round drum of metal, fitting snugly into the interior of the shell. Sleepily they wondered what was in it and made several weary attempts to move it. At nine o’clock the police guard that Doctor Waters had sent for arrived.

  “Tell those damned reporters who are trying to crash in on us to go to hell,” Jack Cantrill told the lieutenant in charge, as he and his two companions were starting wearily back toward camp. “We’ve got to snooze.”

  * * * *

  Several weeks had passed. In a hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona, Doctor Waters was speaking to Mr. and Mrs. Cantrill, who had just arrived.

  “I’m turning the camp and the signaling apparatus over to Radeau and his associates,” he was saying. “No more signals from Mars, somehow, and I don’t feel very much like continuing there anyway. There are a lot more interesting things on the horizon.

  “That drum which Old Faithful brought us—it contained models and many charts and sheets of parchment with drawings on them. I’m beginning to see light through the mystery at last. There are suggestions there for constructing a spaceship. I’m going to work on that problem as long as I live.

  “Maybe I’ll succeed with the help of Old Faithful. Human ingenuity will have to be called on, too, of course. I don’t think that the Martians have the problem completely solved themselves. Old Faithful used the comet, you know.”

  The doctor’s smile broadened as he went on: “Children, how would you like to go to Mars with me some day?”

  “Don’t ask silly questions, dad,” said Yvonne. “We’d go in a minute!”

  The young man nodded seriously. “What a honeymoon that would make, if we could have it now!” he enthused.

  “A million times better than going to Seattle,” the girl agreed.

  The doctor grinned faintly. “Even if you were treated like poor Old Faithful—pickled and put in a museum?”

  “Even if!”

  Jack Cantrill’s eyes narrowed and seemed to stare far away into nothing. His lips and his gaunt sunburned cheeks were stern. Perhaps he was looking into the future toward adventures that might or might not come.

  Something of the same rugged spirit seemed suddenly to have infused itself into the strong, bronzed beauty of the girl at his side. They both loved adventure; they both knew life in the rough.

  At the door Yvonne kissed her father good-bye. “Just a little run up to Seattle, dad,” she explained cheerily, “two or three weeks, maybe. Then both of us back with you—to work.”

  *

  *Mars rotates on its axis in 24 hours, 37 minutes, 22.67 seconds. Phobos, the nearer Moon, which is only 3,700 miles distant from Mars, completes its orbit in only 7 hours, 39 minutes, thus circling its primary more than three times in every Martian day. Since Phobos follows its path in the same direction that the planet rotates, it is evident that to an observer on Mars, it would appear to rise in the west and set in the east.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1934 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  EDMOND HAMILTON

  (1904–1977)

  A well-known writer and space opera pioneer beginning in the 1920s, since his death Hamilton’s career has been somewhat overshadowed by that of his fellow author and wife, Leigh Brackett. Like many writers in the Depression, they both wrote in whatever genre would pay the bills that month, be it SF, Western, or True Romance. While Hamilton made a transition from pulp adventure writer to Captain Future author to writing comics, his wife went from writing Westerns and planetary romances to being one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed screenwriters.

  A child prodigy who entered college at fourteen to become an engineer but flunked out three years later, Hamilton took to writing while working on the Pennsylvania Railroad, selling his first story to Weird Tales in 1926. By 1928 he was writing the planetary adventures that made him famous.

  THE SARGASSO OF SPACE, by Edmond Hamilton

  First published in Astounding Stories, September 1931

  Captain Crain faced his crew calmly. “We may as well face the facts, men,” he said. “The ship’s fuel-tanks are empty and we are drifting through space toward the dead-area.”

  The twenty-odd officers and men gathered on the middle-deck of the freighter Pallas made no ans
wer, and Crain continued:

  “We left Jupiter with full tanks, more than enough fuel to take us to Neptune. But the leaks in the starboard tanks lost us half our supply, and we had used the other half before discovering that. Since the ship’s rocket-tubes cannot operate without fuel, we are simply drifting. We would drift on to Neptune if the attraction of Uranus were not pulling us to the right. That attraction alters our course so that in three ship-days we shall drift into the dead-area.”

  Rance Kent, first-officer of the Pallas, asked a question: “Couldn’t we, raise Neptune with the radio, sir, and have them send out a fuel-ship in time to reach us?”

  “It’s impossible, Mr. Kent,” Crain answered. “Our main radio is dead without fuel to run its dynamotors, and our auxiliary set hasn’t the power to reach Neptune.”

  “Why not abandon ship in the space-suits,” asked Liggett, the second-officer, “and trust to the chance of some ship picking us up?”

  The captain shook his head. “It would be quite useless, for we’d simply drift on through space with the ship into the dead-area.”

  The score of members of the crew, bronzed space-sailors out of every port in the solar system, had listened mutely. Now, one of them, a tall tube-man, stepped forward a little.

  “Just what is this dead-area, sir?” he asked. “I’ve heard of it, but as this is my first outer-planet voyage, I know nothing about it.”

  “I’ll admit I know little more,” said Liggett, “save that a good many disabled ships have drifted into it and have never come out.”

  * * * *

  “The dead area,” Crain told them, “is a region of space ninety thousand miles across within Neptune’s orbit, in which the ordinary gravitational attractions of the solar system are dead. This is because in that region the pulls of the sun and the outer planets exactly balance each other. Because of that, anything in the dead-area, will stay in there until time ends, unless it has power of its own. Many wrecked space-ships have drifted into it at one time or another, none ever emerging; and it’s believed that there is a great mass of wrecks somewhere in the area, drawn and held together by mutual attraction.”

  “And we’re drifting in to join them,” Kent said. “Some prospect!”

  “Then there’s really no chance for us?” asked Liggett keenly.

  Captain Crain thought. “As I see it, very little,” he admitted. “If our auxiliary radio can reach some nearby ship before the Pallas enters the dead-area, we’ll have a chance. But it seems a remote one.”

  He addressed himself to the men: “I have laid the situation frankly before you because I consider you entitled to the truth. You must remember, however, that while there is life there is hope.

  “There will be no change in ship routine, and the customary watches will be kept. Half-rations of food and water will be the rule from now on, though. That is all.”

  As the men moved silently off, the captain looked after them with something of pride.

  “They’re taking it like men,” he told Kent and Liggett. “It’s a pity there’s no way out for them and us.”

  “If the Pallas does enter the dead-area and join the wreck-pack,” Liggett said, “how long will we be able to live?”

  “Probably for some months on our present condensed air and food supplies,” Crain answered. “I would prefer, myself, a quicker end.”

  “So would I,” said Kent. “Well, there’s nothing left but to pray for some kind of ship to cross our path in the next day or two.”

  * * * *

  Kent’s prayers were not answered in the next ship-day, nor in the next. For, though one of the Pallas’ radio-operators was constantly at the instruments under Captain Crain’s orders, the weak calls of the auxiliary set raised no response.

  Had they been on the Venus or Mars run, Kent told himself, there would be some chance, but out here in the vast spaces, between the outer planets, ships were fewer and farther between. The big, cigar-shaped freighter drifted helplessly on in a broad curve toward the dreaded area, the green light-speck of Neptune swinging to their left.

  On the third ship-day Kent and Captain Crain stood in the pilot-house behind Liggett, who sat at the now useless rocket-tube controls. Their eyes were on the big glass screen of the gravograph. The black dot on it that represented their ship was crawling steadily toward the bright red circle that stood for the dead-area.…

  They watched silently until the dot had crawled over the circle’s red line, heading toward its center.

  “Well, we’re in at last,” Kent commented. “There seems to be no change in anything, either.”

  Crain pointed to the instrument-panel. “Look at the gravitometers.”

  Kent did. “All dead! No gravitational pull from any direction—no, that one shows a slight attraction from ahead!”

  “Then gravitational attraction of some sort does exist in the dead-area after all!” Liggett exclaimed.

  “You don’t understand,” said Crain. “That attraction from ahead is the pull of the wreck-pack at the dead-area’s center.”

  “And it’s pulling the Pallas toward it?” Kent exclaimed.

  Crain nodded. “We’ll probably reach the wreck-pack in two more ship-days.”

  * * * *

  The next two ship-days seemed to Kent drawn out endlessly. A moody silence had grown upon the officers and men of the ship. All seemed oppressed by the strange forces of fate that had seized the ship and were carrying it, smoothly and soundlessly, into this region of irrevocable doom.

  The radio-operators’ vain calls had ceased. The Pallas drifted on into the dreaded area like some dumb ship laden with damned souls. It drifted on, Kent told himself, as many a wrecked and disabled ship had done before it, with the ordinary activities and life of the solar system forever behind it, and mystery and death ahead.

  It was toward the end of the second of those two ship-days that Liggett’s voice came down from the pilot-house:

  “Wreck-pack in sight ahead!”

  “We’ve arrived, anyway!” Kent cried, as he and Crain hastened up into the pilot house. The crew was running to the deck-windows.

  “Right ahead there, about fifteen degrees left,” Liggett told Kent and Crain, pointing. “Do you see it?”

  Kent stared; nodded. The wreck-pack was a distant, disk-like mass against the star-flecked heavens, a mass that glinted here and there in the feeble sunlight of space. It did not seem large, but, as they drifted steadily closer in the next hours, they saw that in reality the wreck-pack was tremendous, measuring at least fifty miles across.

  Its huge mass was a heterogeneous heap, composed mostly of countless cigar-like space-ships in all stages of wreckage. Some appeared smashed almost out of all recognizable shape, while others were, to all appearances unharmed. They floated together in this dense mass in space, crowded against one another by their mutual attraction.

  There seemed to be among them every type of ship known in the solar system, from small, swift mail-boats to big freighters. And, as they drifted nearer, the three in the pilot-house could see that around and between the ships of the wreck-pack floated much other matter—fragments of wreckage, meteors, small and large, and space-debris of every sort.

  The Pallas was drifting, not straight toward the wreck-pack, but in a course that promised to take the ship past it.

  “We’re not heading into the wreck-pack!” Liggett exclaimed. “Maybe we’ll drift past it, and on out the dead-area’s other side!”

  * * * *

  Captain Crain smiled mirthlessly. “You’re forgetting your space-mechanics, Liggett. We will drift along the wreck-pack’s edge, and then will curve in and go round it in a closing spiral until we reach its edge.”

  “Lord, who’d have thought there were so many wrecks here!” Kent marvelled. “There must be thousands of them!”

  “They’ve been collecting here ever since the first interplanetary rocket-ships went forth,” Crain reminded him. “Not only meteor-wrecked ships, but ships whose mechani
sms went wrong—or that ran out of fuel like ours—or that were captured and sacked, and then set adrift by space-pirates.”

  The Pallas by then was drifting along the wreck-pack’s rim at a half-mile distance, and Kent’s eyes were running over the mass.

  “Some of those ships look entirely undamaged. Why couldn’t we find one that has fuel in its tanks, transfer it to our own tanks, and get away?” he asked.

  Crain’s eyes lit. “Kent, that’s a real chance! There must be some ships in that pack with fuel in them, and we can use the space-suits to explore for them!”

  “Look, we’re beginning to curve in around the pack now!” Liggett exclaimed.

  The Pallas, as though loath to pass the wreck-pack, was curving inward to follow its rim. In the next hours it continued to sail slowly around the great pack, approaching closer and closer to its edge.

  In those hours Kent and Crain and all in the ship watched with a fascinated interest that even knowledge of their own peril could not kill. They could see swift-lined passenger-ships of the Pluto and Neptune runs shouldering against small space-yachts with the insignia of Mars or Venus on their bows. Wrecked freighters from Saturn or Earth floated beside rotund grain-boats from Jupiter.

  The debris among the pack’s wrecks was just as varied, holding fragments of metal, dark meteors of differing size—and many human bodies. Among these were some clad in the insulated space-suits, with their transparent glassite helmets. Kent wondered what wreck they had abandoned hastily in those suits, only to be swept with it into the dead-area, to die in their suits.