The early williamson, p.19
The Early Williamson, page 19
Through cold, stark lips he gasped out futile curses. He felt as if the black and hideous beak of the brain were sinking into his own throat. He and Keening had been long together. The little man had proved a true comrade, staunch and daring.
Must he stand and see his body drained by this red vampire-brain?
Ellis forced himself forward once more, in a vain battle against the rigor of his strange paralysis. Then, belatedly, he remembered the heavy revolver in his pocket.
His hands were numb and stiff and dead, tingling painfully. But at last they had grasped and lifted the weapon. Holding it clumsily in both hands, he shot into the mass of the red brain.
The scarlet mountain heaved and trembled. The white tentacles released Keening, dropped him inertly supine before the tiny face. The septuple green orbs stared at Ellis with maleficent evil, with a fear that was terrible and a hate that was consuming.
Fighting the tingling numbness of his stark body, Ellis stumbled forward, firing at the virescent eyes. One of them became a pendulous smear of green jelly, and then another.
Then the revolver was empty. And the things that had been men were rushing at him. Skeletons swathed in ghostly blue, running with dumb and implacable automatism.
Ellis realized that he had not time to load again. The 193 things, in seconds, would be upon him. And bullets, after all, might do little great or immediate hurt to the mountainous brain. What could he do? His thoughts raced wildly, and one idea leapt into his mind.
The body of the giant brain was the mechanism that surrounded it. The thick tubes were obviously its veins, the throbbing pumps its heart, the violet liquid in the tanks its blood. If the mechanism had some vulnerable part…
If he could break the glass tanks…
His body was still stiff with the icy, numbing deadness in which the soundless music had left him. And the stalking, mechanical, half-transparent men were near. He staggered toward the nearer tank, grasping the heavy revolver by the barrel.
He stumbled against the side of the tank, hammered desperately upon it with the gun. Apparently it was glass, but very thick and tough. White cracks radiated from the points of impact, but it did not shatter.
Then the monsters were clawing at him with gleaming, skeletal talons—shocking him with the contact of their death-cold bodies. They dragged him back.
He saw little Keening, lying limp and helpless on the blue floor before that malign, black-beaked face, the white, ophidian tentacles writhing over his body.
Ellis twisted in the cold, glowing hands that held him. Savagely he struck with the gun at grinning, blue-clad skulls. And once more, for a little time, he was free.
The glass was unbreakable. He flung himself at the mechanism of the throbbing pump—the heart of the red brain. It looked delicate enough. A few blows upon the gears and gliding plungers…
But he did not reach the pump.
The music of madness once more struck him, beat through all his body with its soundless and hypnotic melody. A helpless tool of weird vibration, he dropped the revolver. And he was swept toward the tiny, malevolent face of the red brain.
White, slender tentacles reached out, whipped around his body. With irresistible strength they tightened, contracted. Toward the shrunken, hideous face he was drawn. Toward the narrow black beak and the evilly green, seven-orbed eyes.
He saw Keening struggling to his feet, gasped at him:
‘Run, Keening! I’ll make a fuss! You might—’
A hard white coil wrapped around his neck, cut off his voice. He saw the little man running toward him, heard him cry out:
‘Oh! Ellis! My-‘
It was the first time Ellis had heard the whispering man speak aloud, or address him by his Christian name.
Another white tentacle darted out, coiled about the technician’s body. The two were drawn helpless toward the black-beaked face.
Then the brain rotted.
It had none of the immunity to terrestrial bacteria that has been developed by the higher life of Earth. Its soft tissues must have formed an ideal culture for the microorganisms of decay introduced into them by Ellis Drew’s pistol bullets.
It collapsed. It sloughed into a heap of writhing ruin. It flowed in rivers of red corruption.
The tentacles softened and broke. Ellis and Keening flung them off and staggered away.
The translucent, glowing men died with the brain—if they had not been already dead, and merely animated by the supernal will of that colossal intelligence.
Ellis and Keening ran out of the great room, pursued by the reeking stench of rapid dissolution.
Once again, and slowly, they crossed the circular plain that must have been the site of the planet’s last city. Ellis whispered as they walked across it:
‘That brain must have been alive when this city was inhabited. It was that old. It clung to an unnatural existence after its world and its kind were dead, gathering evil power of science, until it was able to reach across space with that music. It must have been something like radio. Vibration in the ether. Hypnotic suggestion borne on a carrying wave. It mastered the human race. Made them build the cube, and brought them here. For slaves? For food?’
‘Now, Ellis, we can go back,’ Keening whispered through his bandages.
‘I’m going,’ said Ellis, ‘to look into that cube. I had a friend; I told you when we were coming back from the moon -‘
‘Durand?’
‘Yes, Durand.’
They approached the mile-high cube. Midway of its silvery wall they found a broad stage leading up to a small, square door. Side by side they walked up, and entered the cube.
The interior was lit with cold, pallid, sourceless blue radiance. In it they saw infinite corridors of metal shelves, stretching to far distances, rising tier upon tier. The whole cube was filled with shelves.
And upon the aluminum shelves, side by side, lay human beings, the uncounted millions who had been carried from the Earth. They were motionless, deathly quiet. They lay in heavy, utter silence. Their flesh shone translucent and blue, and skeletal frames were visible beneath it.
Ellis stared at them, and touched the arm of one.
‘Dead,’ he whispered. ‘All dead.’
‘Better that,’ breathed Keening, ‘than to live as those others did.’
The Cosmobile lifted above the ghostly blue radiance of the pit, and came once more into the clean light of the stars. A bright yellow point, the sun shone across the void, warm and welcoming. Ellis and Keening remained together upon the bridge until the course was set, until the grim and cragged desolation of the black planet had dropped for ever behind.
‘We are left alone, of all humanity,’ Keening whispered solemnly. ‘Think of it.’
‘There’s really no use in going back,’ Ellis said. ‘We can only grow old and die, the last men on a dead planet.
‘I haven’t ever told you, Keening. But there was a girl who wanted to go with me to the moon. It was she I wanted to see, when we came back. If I had taken her -‘
‘You mean Tempest Durand?’
‘Yes. But how did you know her name? I didn’t tell you!’
Keening seemed to smile behind his bandages.
‘I know,’ he whispered. ‘But do you mean you were looking for Tempest Durand—all the time?’
‘Yes, Keening. No good to say so now, but I’d give my life for one moment with her. I was a fool. I left her for fear she would take my attention from my cursed work.’
‘Then you would really like to see her?’
‘Yes, Keening!’ Ellis spoke almost angrily. ‘But there’s no use thinking what might have been…Yet, that’s all there is left for us to do.’
‘I’ll go find her, then,’ whispered Keening. And he slipped away from the bridge, leaving Ellis puzzled at his words.
Ellis was staring through the ports at the pale, tiny point of the sun, when a clear, melodious and well-remembered voice rang out behind him.
‘Ellis, won’t you even look at me?’
He spun around, mouth sagging open in incredulous amazement.
Tempest Durand was standing behind him, slim and beautiful as she had ever been. Her oval face was pale, but it bore a roguish smile.
‘Tempest!’ he gasped.’Tempest!
He choked, and a strangling tension came into his throat. Two strides across the floor, and he seized her slight shoulders, stared into her mocking eyes.
‘Tempest, I’m not dreaming?’ he cried, in poignant, dawning joy. ‘Speak to me, Tempest?’
For a time she gazed silently at him. And then tears broke into her quizzical eyes. She slipped forward into his arms, laughing almost hysterically.
‘Oh, Ellis, I’m so glad.’
‘Tell me,’ he demanded, holding her quivering body. ‘How did you get here? I don’t understand. Did Keening have you hidden?’
‘Lord, no!’ she laughed, tearfully. ‘Don’t you see? There is Keening!’
She held up the familiar mask of bandages.
‘But you didn’t!’ She laughed, reminiscently. ‘When you wouldn’t let me go with you, I meant first to hide on board. Then I thought of the disguise. I had often played masculine parts in dramatics at college. The bandages hid my face, and the same story of the X-ray burns was the excuse for a different voice. Even then I gave myself away a hundred times, but you were so wrapped up in your science you hardly noticed poor Keening.’
‘But, Tempest, why didn’t you tell me, when we got back to the Earth?’
‘I’d no way to know your—your attitude had changed. Anyhow, I was about to. And you called me a coward. Don’t you remember? I wanted to show you. Anyhow, we had to come.’
And thus the Cosmobile drove back to Earth, carrying an Adam and Eve, an Epimetheus and a Pandora, to lift the curtain on another act of the infinite and varied drama of Man.
*
The not-very-believable twist at the end of the story seems to suggest that I wasn’t yet fully aware of women, but at least I had learned to dance. With my brother and sisters I was attending Saturday-night country dances, and I had bought a spring-powered phonograph. There was one fast breakdown—I can’t recall the name of the tune—that I played again and again to get the feel of ‘the music of madness’ for the story.
The plot idea comes from M. P. Shield. I don’t think I had yet read The Purple Cloud, but Ed Hamilton had told it to me when we were camped one night on a Mississippi sandbar, and my imagination has always been haunted by his terrifying vision of one man left all alone in a dead world.
The Plutonian terror is actually terror of progress—that’s what strikes me now when I reread the story. Perhaps I had caught that dread from Wells, whose early fiction I was studying with a vast admiration. Certainly the story owes much to him. The giant brain, ‘the hideous consummation of organic evolution,’ is clearly borrowed from his First Men in the Moon, and its quick decay is a device from The War of the Worlds.
I am hesitant to claim any connection between that pessimistic theme and my real-life affairs, yet I can’t help reflecting that the economic depression had begun to get to me. The pulp magazines had been weathering the hard times without much trouble, I suppose because jobless workers still bought them for cheap entertainment, but disaster now overtook the Clayton chain. I never learned all the details, but Astounding went bimonthly and quit buying stories in 1932. It ceased publication in early •933. Clayton was bankrupt.
This was a heavy blow to my hopes of survival as a writer, because Clayton had been my only good market. To add to my difficulties, Gernsback stopped paying for the stories he was using, even at half a cent a word. After a S50 partial payment for ‘The Moon Era,’ I received nothing from him until 1934, when I got a lawyer to collect $334 due me by then.
‘Salvage in Space,’ written late in 1932, was the last story I sold Bates—the last one I sold anybody for many years for as much as two cents a word. It was featured in the last Clayton issue, with a Wesso cover actually painted for Doc Smith’s novel, Triplanetary, which was to have run as a serial if the magazine had lived.
Reading the story today, I rather like it. Some of the events may be cliches, but I think they are neatly put together. The scientific extrapolations aren’t bad, I think, for 1932. I’m especially happy about the pulsed uranium fission rocket my meteor miner uses, because it is such a clear anticipation of Project Orion.
Orion came twenty-five years later, in the late 1950s. The idea was to propel a spaceship by exploding small atom bombs behind a flat steel pusher plate, one every second. It’s actually a more workable idea than you might first think. Shock absorbers and the mass of the plate itself would protect the payload from impact and radiation damage. A manned version was designed to reach Mars with sixty men and 1,000 tons of supplies after a flight of only three weeks.
I didn’t know about it in 1960, but to the people involved the conquest of space was at hand. The engineering problems had largely been solved. Orion was funded by NASA, the Defense Department, and private industry. Actual hardware was built and tested. But then, in 1961, the whole project had to be scrubbed because the Test-Ban Treaty outlawed atomic bombs in space.
SALVAGE IN SPACE
His ‘plant’ was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest, Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge, bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark mystery of the void.
His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red. He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.
Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of metal—a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the spectro-fiash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious metals was disappointingly minute.*
On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.
Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket’s regular thrust. The magazine of uranite fuel
*The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is ‘mined by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode’s Law. should occupy this space.
The capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected. He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.
Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts? Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion, Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last installment on his Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of iron a month. Why couldn’t fortune smile on him?
He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors for hard years, who still hoped.
But sometime fortune had to smile, and then…
The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a girl waiting, at the silver door—a trim, slender girl in white, with blue eyes and hair richly brown.
Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white was yet only a glorious dream…
The strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it, pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.
Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal vastness of space. And no work of man -save the few tools of his daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being must be tens of millions of miles away.
On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that he was going mad. But sometimes…
Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his huge metal helmet:
‘Brace up, old top. In good company, when you’re by yourself, as Dad used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan and “Chuck” and the rest of the crowd again, at Comet’s place. What price a friendly boxing match with Mason, or an evening at the teleview theater?
‘Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real food, in place of these tasteless concentrates! A hot bath, instead of greasing yourself!
‘Too dull out here. Life—’ He broke off, set his jaw.
No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how did he know that a whizzing meteor wasn’t going to flash him out before he got back?
He drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the suit, into its ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside pocket, and lighted it. The smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the air filters.
