An atrocious murder of helpless passengers, most of us thought. We dragged ourselves hastily on, hot with resentment, to seize the valve before it could be closed, to fight our way from it into the ship and avenge this thing.
Strangely—ominously—our entrance was not opposed.
When we opened the inner seal, Skal Doon, alone and apparently unarmed, met us on the deck inside. A curious grim smile was upon his face, and his mild, limpidly brown eyes were mocking.
‘Skal Doon,’ Kempton barked at him, ‘you’ll answer for the ruthless murder of those innocent passengers!’
‘But, my dear sir,’ the buccaneer protested, in his queerly thin voice, ‘those were my own men! Surely you cannot object!’
‘Eh? The passengers—’
‘—have not been injured, I assure you. They are safely confined to their quarters. I put my men through the valve as an act of mercy.’
‘You might explain.’ Kempton menaced him with an ionic needle.
Doon smiled again, twistedly, and shrilled:
‘You seem to have understood my plan, captain, to fall in a parabola about the Dead Star.’
‘Yes. A simple trick.’
‘When I saw you follow, captain, I realized that you understood. And with the ship on your cable, I realized that I had lost the game. I was forced to select another means of escape. Accordingly, some distance back, I changed the course of the Bellatrix.’
‘What?’ Kempton demanded. ‘What did you do?’
‘You’ll find out, I fancy. And to prevent your undoing my work, I have also wrecked the motors, and short-circuited the generators in such a manner as to burn them out.’
‘But—but your escape—’
‘You have already witnessed the escape of my men. I am now following them. But my deeds, you will find, are to live after me.’
Doon’s jaws contracted suddenly, and something crushed between his teeth. Still smiling, he spat blood and fragments of glass.
‘Farewell, captain. And a safe voyage—to the Dead Star!’
He saluted ironically, and fell heavily upon his face.
In a few mad minutes we verified all he had told us. The passengers were safely locked below. The machinery was wrecked beyond the possibility of repair. Hume and Kempton went to the liner’s bridge.
The Bellatrix, they found, was plunging toward the Dead Star, upon a path that would end in flaming catastrophe. Doon, realizing his defeat, had turned the liner from the parabolic orbit toward that titanic black sun. Truly, his deeds lived after him.
One glance at the graviscope, or gravitational field detector, told Hume that doom was inevitable. Already the needle was pulled to the end of its scale. Even with the full power of her now useless motors, the ship could not have fought free of that relentless drag.
Tonia Andros, unharmed, came running across the deck when the imprisoned passengers were released. She found Gideon Clew and threw her arms around him. The old man bent and caressed her hair and looked into her dark, wistfully happy eyes.
Then Hume came back from the bridge, with the dread news that we were falling toward the Dead Star, helpless, doomed.
Gideon lifted the little girl in his arms and held her tight for a little time, and then set her down.
‘Good-by, Tonia,’ he whispered. ‘There is something I forgot. I must go back on the station a little while. Captain Manners will take care of you. Run to him, now.’
He pushed the grave-eyed, bewildered child away, and hurried toward the valve. Hume followed him, asked:
‘You aren’t going back on board, Clew? It’s death. No air!’
The old man paused, and his sober blue eyes looked back at the puzzled, solemn child.
‘Yeth,’ he lisped. ‘I must go. For her?’
He got back into his space suit, and Hume let him out.
The station’s atmosphere was very thin when Gideon Clew returned—and cold. It glittered in the pale yellow tube-light with a frigid, frosty glint. He could hear the sibilant whisper of it as it hissed out into the frozen void.
He left his space suit in the air lock. Its tube of compressed air would have lasted perhaps an hour longer, but his hands, in its clumsy gloves, could not do the delicate work he had set for them.
Less than an hour, without it, was left him. Already he was breathing hard, as he made his way into the forecastle, gasping painfully from the slight exertion of walking. And there was much to be done—fifty years’ labor to be brought to completion.
Synthetic air was still hissing noisily from the cylinders, perhaps as fast as it was leaking from the hull. But the cylinders, in a few more minutes, would be empty. And the cold due to swift expansion of escaping air filled all the ship; the chill of it seared Gideon’s gasping lungs.
For a little time he stood, panting, shivering, among the complex apparatus in his own, tiny cabin, his laboring heart thumping against his throat. He felt tears come into his eyes at sight of these familiar instruments. Offspring of laborious years, they seemed living, intimate. He did not matter. But the Dead Star should not have his invention. Nor Tonia!
With trembling hands, he began the task. He first removed the tall vacuum tube from its mountings, and broke its air seal. When the room’s frigid air had hissed thinly into it, he unscrewed the base, to examine the damage done when the tube had burned out.
The fine wires of the secondary electrode were fused in silvery beads against the cathode grid. He turned the delicate parts in his quivering, gnarled old hands, and studied them, trying to puzzle out the original defect that had caused the disaster. He searched patiently.
Even as he stood still, he had to gasp for breath. His head throbbed. The utter, unthinkable cold of space crept inexorably into the room; frost danced in the air. Gideon Clew shivered and absently drew his thin jacket closer about his erect old shoulders. One old man, he was pitted against the searching cold and the vacuum of elemental space—against the relentless gravitation of the Dead Star. But he took no time for despair.
At length he saw the defect. The filament should have been longer, the grid set back a little, and turned so. A simple change.
He found a coil of tiny wire and delicate tools, and began to make the repair. That was not difficult. The hard part would be to evacuate the tube again. It was useless with air inside, and he had no pump, or time to use it.
The new parts fitted, he screwed the base back into the tube and then attacked the problem of exhausting it. He knew a way, difficult, perilous—but quick.
As rapidly as he could, with numb, aching hands, he sealed a piece of metal tubing into the tube. Then he found his rotary drill, fitted it with his longest point, and attacked the cabin’s outside wall.
That wall was the beryllo-steel hull of the station. Beyond its four obdurate inches was the vacuum he needed. Trembling, he leaned on the handle of the tool. Cool was piercing into him. His head ached; his ears drummed. Blood began to drip from his nose, drop by crimson drop, to freeze on the floor.
He reeled dizzily, but clung to his task. The drill whirred in his hands, quivered, bit slowly into tough metal. Its motor made a little heat, grateful to his stiffened fingers; he tried to hold them closer against it.
At last the point slipped through. He drew it back, and the air whistled shrilly through the hole, out into the void of space. Just as he had planned. He fitted the end of the metal tubing into it, crudely cemented it. Now the vacuum of space would draw the air from the repaired electron tube.
He closed the switches, and started to the generator room.
The hissing in the corridors had ceased. The air-cylinders were empty. Again the pressure in the ship was dropping, and swiftly.
Gideon’s old heart labored so that he held a numb hand against it. He was suffocating; the thin, cold air seemed to be sucked out of his pumping lungs. His head roared and throbbed; his pulse drummed in his ears. Blood was still oozing from his nostrils, cold and sticky on his face.
And his body was w
ooden. Every movement was a battle against leaden inertia. Every effort burned vital oxygen, increased the strain on heart and lungs. But he must go on—start the generators.
Now on hands and knees, he crawled along the corridor. His hands were stiff, lifeless things. No sensation came from them as they fell upon the metal floor.
No longer could he see. Blackness crowded upon him, lit with strange, lurid flashes of crimson. His head whirled; he felt that the ship was swinging, spinning, under him. A blind automaton, he crawled on. And the face of Tonia Andros danced before him, smooth and childish, dark eyes wistfully solemn.
Every tissue of his leaden, tortured body screamed at him: ‘Stop! Stop! Rest! Forget!’
So he came at last into the generator room. With infinite effort he pulled himself up against the instrument board. There he leaned, gasping, trembling, blood trickling frtm his nose—straining every atom of his will to see!
The darkness at last cleared for a moment, and the roaring quieted in his head. He read the dials, and with stiff hands moved the switches. All the processes were familiar, automatic. If only he could hold himself up to carry them out!
He grasped the final lever with dead, insensate paws, and drew it down as he fell.
The old man lay gasping upon the floor, blood gushing from his nostrils in a scarlet, frothy flood—but he heard the soft whir of the generators, the shrill, rising whine of transformers.
All of us were silent for a time, upon the Bellatrix, when Hume told us that Gideon Clew had gone back. We were all thinking of his cheery old face, with its red cheeks and its round, sober blue eyes. Of his faith, his optimism. And all of us were sorry we would never hear his lisping voice again.
But our minds were soon feverishly back upon more immediate things.
‘After all, it’s rather a splendid way to die,’ Vance told Hume. But his voice was unsteady.
They had gone back together to the bridge, and from its vitrolar panels stood watching the incandescent wonder of the nebula, the Dead Star grasped in its fiery tentacles, a growing black disk, splotched with red.
The battered, oxide-reddened hull of the station was drifting alongside at the end of her cable, her dark ellipsoid outlined against the green-tinged, flaming vortexes of the nebula. Hume looked at it.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, with slow deliberation. ‘But old Clew—Going back to work with his machine, till the end—’
Vance did not reply, and they gazed out upon the supernal majesty that infolded them. The Great Nebula: angry, swirling masses of virescent fire, white curtains and streamers and sheets, greenish, dazzling, clotted condensations. Cosmic clouds of flame, shrouding a grim, lifeless sun. The Dead Star: ominous black disk against lucent glory. Its lurid crimson spots—seas of molten lava, wide enough to swallow planets—started back like red, evil eyes.
Vance laughed hollowly, nervously. He whispered: ‘When?’
Hume turned, found an astro-sextant on the chart table. He put it to his eye and read the apparent diameter of the Dead Star, and busied himself with his pocket calculator.
‘Five hours—
Vance said nothing, and they watched the menacing, red-spotted blackness of the Dead Star’s face. It was minutes later that he licked his lips and added:
‘The acceleration increases, of course, as we fall nearer. Just above the surface, the force upon us will be upward of a ton for every pound of our bodies. We will have no sensation of it, though, because we are falling with it, free. And we aren’t heading directly for the center of the disk. Momentum will carry us part-way around. We’ll strike on the other side—’
A long silence, and Vance spoke again.
‘Old Clew’s gravity-screen! No wonder he went daft on it, looking down in the Dead Star for fifty years. And no doubt dreaming of something like this.’
He laughed, loudly, mirthlessly.
Kempton gathered the nervous, bewildered passengers into the main saloon, and spoke to them.
‘We are falling into the Dead Star,’ he said. ‘Nothing in the universe can save us. Nothing short of a breach of the law of gravitation. But the end will not be painful. We will flash instantaneously into incandescent gas. I advise you to get the most you can out of the few hours left to us. The whole ship is at your disposal. I will welcome any plans for diversion.
‘But if any ,of you should feel that you cannot endure the strain of waiting, you will find the ship’s surgeon ready in the sick bay with painless anaesthetics.’
He stopped; with a gesture to indicate that he was done. The passengers milled about, white-faced, and stared unknowingly at each other, as if they had all been strangers.
Tonia Andros was going about the decks, asking in a bewildered and fearful voice where Gideon was, and why he didn’t come back. Kempton found her and brought her with him to the bridge. Through the transparent panels she saw the Dead Star, a black, red-pocked disk, ever increasing, hung against curtains of supernal light.
She shuddered, drew back.
‘It’s like a face!’ she cried. ‘With red eyes, gloating—’
And with anxious solemnity she demanded of Hume: ‘Where is my Granddad?’
The mate pointed to the station—a battered, twisted mass against the flaming arms of the nebula.
‘Let’s go across!’ she cried, with big-eyed, wistful earnestness. ‘I want to find my Granddad!’
Hume shook his head. ‘It’s no use, Tonia. The air was leaking out. He won’t come back. He’s—gone, now.’
The mate averted his eyes, and the little girl still stared bewilderedly into the vitrolar panels.
‘Look!’ she cried out. ‘The green light! What is it? Do you see it? There! There!’
Then Hume saw a pale, virescent glow spreading swiftly over the battered red hull, like a film of oil upon water. Green luminescence streamed down the cable to the Bellatrix; in an instant it was shining upon the metal frames of the vision panels.
Then a bell clanged from the graviscope, and he ran back to it. He saw that the needle, that a moment before had been drawn to the end of its scale by the terrific pull of the Dead Star, had returned to zero. In unbelieving wonder, he stared at the instrument. Then he spun upon Kempton, eagerly.
‘The old man was trying to generate an ionic screen that would reflect the radiation of gravity. That green glow is his screen—I know it is! And the graviscope shows that we have been cut out of all gravitational fields!’
‘And I,’ Kempton muttered, ‘I thought-just an old fool—’
‘Don’t you see what it means?’ Hume cried in sudden, feverish eagerness. ‘We aren’t going directly toward the Dead Star, and now it can’t curve our path any more! We’ll fly on past! We’ll have time to make repairs, or photophone for aid!’
Tonia Andros was staring at him with round, wide eyes.
‘Then Granddad is still all right?’ she cried. ‘Let’s go across and find him!’
She snatched Kempton’s hand, tugged toward the door.
‘Yes, he’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘And, yes—we’ll go—’
Nonstop to Mars
• • •
Here is the record of Lucky Leith's incredible flight; how he piloted his ancient ship through the thunder between two worlds—to become the first Robinson Crusoe of space.
I
Something was queerly wrong— with either the ship or the air. And Carter Leigh knew that it couldn’t be the ship. The creaking old Phoenix might be obsolescent in a world that the new cathion rockets had conquered, but he knew every bolt and strut of her. Knew her well enough to take her apart and put her up again, in the dark. And loved her, for her loyalty through six years and half a million miles of solo flight.
No, the trouble couldn’t be in the Phoenix. It had to be the atmosphere.
He couldn’t understand it. But the barometric altimeter had kept luring him down, toward frozen peaks that loomed a thousand feet higher than they should have been. The engine labored, and the thrust of i
t weakened dangerously. And the wind that struck him over the pole was a screaming demon, more freakishly violent than he had ever met before.
It baffled him. Through all the endless, weary night, deaf with the long thunder of the loyal old engine, sitting stiff with cold even in his electrically heated suit, gulping coffee from a vacuum jug, pouring over charts and studying instruments with aching blood-shot eyes—ever since the last strange sunset, he had hopelessly picked at the sinister riddle.
Nonstop flights were nothing new to Carter Leigh. Men. locking at the long record of his feats, had nicknamed him “Lucky.” But he had something more than luck. In his lean body there was the tremendous endurance that it took to fly on. hour after straining hour, when most men would have dropped over the stick.
And this flight—nonstop from Capetown to Honolulu, across the bottom of the world—had promised to be no harder than the rest. Not until he saw that last sunset.
Behind him, beyond tie cragged granite fangs of Enderby Land, as he climbed above the ramparts of the polar plateau, the sunset had been frighteningly strange. An incredible wheel of crimson, rolling along the rim of the world, it had been winged and tufted with eldritch green.
The aurora was ar other disquieting scrap of the puzzle. It burned above him all that night, whenever the sky was clear, until all the white antarctic wilderness seemed on fire with its sinister and shifting brilliance.
The cold was another thing. Leigh had made polar flights before. But never had he met such merciless temperatures. The motor, even with cowl ventilators closed, grew sluggish with it. It crept into the cockpit and probed deep into his body.
Beyond the pole and Marie Byrd Land, over the dark Antarctic again, he met a wall of cloud. He tried to climb over it. Heavy and dull with altitude and fatigue, he opened the oxygen valve. The vital gas revived him a little. But the plane could not scale the summits of vapor. He flew? into them—wondering.
Savage winds battled in the cloud, and it was riven w th lightning. Rain hammered the ship, and froze on it, until the ice dragged it almost to the surface. Leigh fought the elements, and fought the mounting weariness in him, and came at last unexpectedly into the calm of a strange northward dawn.
The Best of Jack Williamson Page 4