Collected short fiction, p.310
Collected Short Fiction, page 310
“Physically,” he told her, “you would do admirably. And you have intelligence, quickness, and, I believe, a sense of humor. But unfortunately you have other qualities that outweigh all these.
“Try to imagine yourself living a civilized life in a civilized home,” he challenged. “You just couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t fit in—not with a schedule of forty-eight minutes a day for food.
“I hope I’ve made my point—that female astronomers who completely ignore the fact that they are women are just as out of place in a civilized world as extreme nonstop fliers.”
Her first low laugh, and the light of amusement in her eyes, halted his argument. But her laughter grew higher and more breathless until she could not stop. Leigh saw that she was hysterical. He dashed a tin can of cold sea-water into her face. She caught a sobbing breath and mopped at her eyes. With another glance at her watch, she rose abruptly.
“Come,” she said in a shaken voice. “And let’s see if there’ll be any homes in the world ahead.”
III
THE squat mass of the twelve-inch reflector looked through a slit in the end of the building that had escaped destruction. Its clockwork, beneath the humming of the little motor-generator, made a muffled ticking.
Visible in the dim light of a shaded bulb, the girl twisted the turret and swiftly set the circles. Before she had done, Leigh knew that her object was the red point of Mars in the east.
For a long time, sitting with her eye to the lens, she was silent. Leigh could see the trembling of her small hand, touching the control wheels again and again. At last she rose and stood staring eastward through the slit, rubbing at her red eyes. Her face was bloodless.
“Well?” said Leigh.
“It’s what I thought,” she whispered. “Mars!”
Leigh moved into the seat she had left. His eye found the ocular. In its little disk of darkness, a single star burned with changing red and blue. And the disk of Mars, still too near the horizon for good observation, blurred and rippled as if painted on a black flag flying in the wind.
Even for a moment of good seeing, when the image steadied, that mistiness did not clear. But he could distinguish the wide dark equatorial markings—darker, in fact, than he had supposed them—and the white ellipse of the south polar cap.
Two things he saw that puzzled him. Beside the polar cap was a little dark fleck—the darkest marking on the planet—that had an oddly purplish color. And across the yellow-red of the planet, toward it, was drawn a twisting silver thread.
The image blurred and shimmered again, and Leigh rose impatiently from the instrument. A little ache throbbed in his unaccustomed eyes. He turned anxiously to the girl.
“Still I don’t understand,” he said. “I saw a little purple circle, not far from the polar cap. And a queer white thread twisting into it. But everything looked hazy.”
“That’s just it,” her tired voice told him. “Mars is hazed and dim with atmosphere—atmosphere stolen from the Earth. That silver thread is the other end of the tube of force that we have been calling a tornado—sucking air from the Earth across to Mars!”
It took a moment for the full meaning to strike him. Then swiftly he felt the shock of it run through his whole body, and he swayed a little, standing there.
“But,” he muttered al last, “I thought there were no Martians!”
“It has been pretty well agreed that there are no intelligent inhabitants,” she said. “My father gave up the last great attempt to signal Mars ten years ago. But since that time something has happened to Mars.”
“What?”
“It just happens,” she told him slowly, “that that purple-blue spot, under the other end of the vortex tube, is exactly where the object we called the Stellar Shell struck Mars, two months ago.”
He stared at her, in the dim observatory.
“Then—you think—”
“The inference is inevitable. The Stellar Shell was a ship. It brought living beings to Mars, from somewhere. They needed a heavier atmosphere for survival. Across on Earth—now, at opposition, less than fifty million miles away—they saw the atmosphere they required. With the same science that built and navigated the Stellar Shell, they have reached across to take what they require.”
Leigh caught his breath.
“Why didn’t they land on Earth in the first place?”
“Why should they, if they are able to reach from one world to another to take what they want? Perhaps Mars, with half the Earth’s sunlight and a third of its gravity, suited them better in other regards.”
Leigh’s brain was spinning.
“Stealing the world’s air! How possibly can they do that?”
“I saw one clue,” the girl told him. “The two satellites are very difficult objects, even with the refinements of this instrument. It was hard to find them. When I did, they were both much too far from the planet. They are plunging out into space, away from their old orbits!”
“And that means—”
“It means that they have been cut off from the gravitational attraction of Mars. I think that is because the gravitational pull of the planet, by a power of science quite beyond our grasp, has been focused into a tube of force that reaches fifty million miles across space to our atmosphere.”
“That queer tornado?”
“Exactly.” The girl nodded. “Our atmosphere is being drawn up it. It seems to race around the Earth every day, because the Earth is turning under it. The violent air currents it causes, and the very loss of air, generate the storms. The unusual sunsets and auroras are doubtless due to the incidental forces that form and direct the tube.”
BESIDE the girl, Leigh peered up through the narrow slit. In the bar of purple sky, Mars was a baleful orange-red point. His staggered mind groped for understanding of its menace.
“What can they be?” he whispered. The girl’s own voice was dry. “Probably they are interstellar voyagers. They came from the south, quite possibly from one of the nearer stars in Centaurus. Beings capable of such a flight must be as far from our comprehension as we are from that of the ants. And we must be as helpless before them.”
“Ants can sting,” muttered Leigh. But a breath of night air through the slit seemed strangely cold, and he shuddered again. “When do you suppose they’ll stop?”
Elene Gayle’s yellow head shook in the dimness, wearily.
“Who knows? We could spare them half our atmosphere, and still survive in the lowlands, though the climate everywhere would be far more severe. Possibly they will be satisfied in time. Possibly the advance of the Earth in its orbit will break their tube of force—until the next opposition, two years away.”
“Mars is a smaller planet,” Leigh said. “They shouldn’t need so much air.”
“Because of the lighter gravity,” the girl told him, “to get the same pressure and density, they would need more.”
“So we are at their mercy? Is there nothing to be done?”
Her face was gray and hopeless. “People will react in the ways predictable from their known characteristics,” she said. “Most of the world’s population has already been driven into a helpless panic. The governments that stand will try to mobilize their armies—against an enemy they will never even see before they die. Only a few scientists will try to make a calm analysis of the problem, try to discover what, if anything, can be done. I doubt that anything can be done.”
IV
THE rocket arrived before midnight.
Elene Gayle had been at the radio all evening, guiding it in with her signals listening to the reports of planet-wide confusion and terror; and trying in vain to get some message through to her Foundation’s rocket research laboratory on the New Mexico desert.
When the blue luminescent cathion jets streaked across the stars, Leigh ran with flares to light the beach. It plunged down at an alarming angle, a forward blast checking it in a great cloud of blue flame, and two men tumbled out of it.
The girl came with Leigh to meet them. The thin gray man with a pointed beard was Dr. Laymon Duval, assistant director of the Foundation. And the tall slender black-helmeted pilot, he knew without asking, was Laird Cragin.
Cragin was limping, patched with bandages. The girl nodded to the older man, greeted Cragin with a warm handshake. His handsome face smiled at her.
“Sorry to be late, Gay,” he said. “But the freak storm cracked me up in the Marquesas Islands. Had to wait for Dr. Duval, in another fire-boat. But here we are!”
The thin grave voice of the older man cut in, anxiously:
“You are quite certain, Dr. Gayle—certain of the facts in your code message? You really believe that stellar invaders on Mars are robbing the Earth of its air?”
“Duval,” the girl asked briskly, “do I make mistakes?”
“Fewer than any man I know,” he granted. “What action do you suggest?”
“Return at once,” Elene Gayle said instantly. “Get full support from the President and the War Department. Rush our experimental rocket to completion in New Mexico. Arm it. Send it to Mars to stop the loss of atmosphere.”
Duval’s gray head shook, doubtfully.
“The only thing we can do,” he admitted. “But you know I have been in charge at Alamogordo. And I’m reasonably certain that our rocket can’t be completed before the air-loss, continuing at the present rate, will force abandonment of the project.
“Even,” he added forebodingly, “neglecting the weeks required for the flight—”
“Anyhow,” the girl broke in, “we must try. I’ll fly back to America with you tonight.”
“Tonight?” Carter Leigh echoed her last word. He groped instinctively for the girl’s arm.
“I’ll go with you, Elene,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll fly your rocket to Mars.”
“Thanks, Leigh.” She turned briefly toward him. “But you’re not a rocket pilot.” She turned back to Cragin. “Load fuel and oxygen. We’ve no time to spare.”
“Hullo.” In the smooth voice of Laird Cragin was no very cordial recognition. “So you’re Lucky Nonstop Leigh? Well, it looks like you stopped, this time, in a rather unlucky spot. Better watch that storm at dawn. It cuts a swath around the world, every day, through the thirties. Perth and Buenos Aires already gone.”
“Back in a moment,” the girl said. “I’ve some notes to get.”
Carter Leigh watched her run back into the dark, toward the observatory. Listening silently to Cragin, as he helped lift aboard a drum of the kappa fuel, he tried to hide the despair in him.
“Sorry, old man,” Cragin was saying. “But I guess the job will fall to me. I’ve been test-hopping the experimental models. If Gay sends her rocket to Mars, I’ll go with it.”
Leigh caught his breath, Laird Cragin was no doubt a brave and skilful man, even now promising to face certain death tor the world’s sake. Bui suddenly Leigh hated him with a blind savage hatred. He trembled, and his fists balled up. Tears swelled in his eyes, until the girl, running back out of the dark with a thick brief case, was only a misty shadow.
“We’d like to give you a lift, old man,” Cragin’s voice was smoothly regretful. “But this is only a three-place job. And we’ve no time—”
“Thanks,” Leigh managed to say. “But I’ve got the old Phoenix.”
Elene Gayle paused to take his hand. Her fingers felt strong and cool.
“Goodbye, Leigh,” she said briskly. “Sorry we must leave you. Watch the storm. Make any use you can of our supplies and equipment here. Get north, if you can, out of its track.”
Leigh did not answer.
Duval was already in tie rocket. Cragin swung the girl in, leapt after her, slid forward the curved transparent hatch. Leigh stood stupidly motionless until the pilot opened it again to shout a warning.
He stumbled back. The blue electronic exhausts bellowed out about him. His skin tingled. Ozone burned his lungs. Blinded, he covered his eyes. When he could see again, the rocket was a dim blue star, dropping and dimming, north-northeast.
CARTER LEIGH stood alone on the beach, softly whistling the melancholy notes of Barbara Allen. Alone on Manumotu. It was midnight. Six hours, more or less, until that world-circling funnel should pass again.
Southward, beyond the dark loom of the peak, the strange aurora rose again. Sprays of green and orange crossed the zenith. That eerie light showed him the old Phoenix, lying upside down on the pale white beach. He plodded heavily down toward her.
“Well, old girl,” he muttered. “Cracked up or not, it looks like we’ve got to make one more flight—unless we want to be picked up by that wind between the worlds.”
He stopped abruptly on the coral sand. His eyes lifted swiftly from the battered old crate on the beach, up to the red and baleful eye of Mars, now well past the meridian. His mind pictured that silver cord from world to world. And his lips pursed for a soundless whistle.
“Well, why not?”
He stumbled to the old plane. His trembling hand touched the cold metal of her prop. His voice was quick and breathless.
“Why not, old lady?” he muttered again. “There’s air all the way. And where there’s air, you can fly with gasoline. It’s thin and rough, maybe. But we’ve flown high before, and met our share of bumps.”
He walked around the plane, inspected rudder and elevator.
“Quite a wind, I guess. But it will be behind us. And when you’ve got fifty million miles to make, you need the wind behind you!”
He peered in the darkness at the damaged aileron.
“The percentage may be a billion to one against us. But what’s the difference? You’re extinct as the dodo, old girl. And I am, too. And we’re getting wise to the fact.
“After all, why not? She’ll probably be flying to Mars with Cragin, if they get their rocket done. We might as well be there to meet ’em.
“Okay, duchess! Let’s get going!”
He knew it wouldn’t be easy to get the plane righted and repaired and in the air in the six hours that remained before the wind funnel returned. But he had been in spots almost as tight before. There was the time he came down on the arctic tundra with a broken prop, and whittled out one of his own. . . .
Lucky he had the supplies and equipment at the abandoned station. He walked back for ropes and tackle. In an hour the old ship was on her retractable wheels again, with no more than incidental injury.
He started the motor, taxied the ship up beside the building where he could have electric light, and went to work on the twisted aileron. When that was crudely mended, he found half a dozen other necessary repairs—and still, for all he knew, there might be some hidden harm that he could not discover till the ship was in the air.
FOUR precious hours gone before the plane was ready to load. Two things he had to have—gasoline and oxygen. The air was already growing thin on Earth, but it would be thinner still in that tube of force.
Tumbling aside the drums of rocket fuel and cases of supplies, he began carrying crated tins of gasoline and pouring them into the empty tanks. Ten gallons at a trip. The empty tanks held three hundred, and he stacked tins behind the cockpit.
The Southern Cross tilted above the peak. Time fled away. He panted. Even in the chill of morning, he was drenched with sweat. Lucky the Foundation had been so generous with fuel for the motor-generator and the stoves. Lower octane rating than quite agreed with the ancient engine. But, if he started on the other, it would do.
The first ominous promise of dawn was in the east, before that task was done. Now the oxygen. He staggered under the weight of the long steel cylinders. Four of them. That was all he dared load.
Red tongues were leaping up in the east now; the vortex would soon be here. And he’d have to be high to meet it—as high as the Phoenix could climb. And even there, in the softer hands of the upper atmosphere;, the odds would be overwhelmingly against him.
He made a last dash for an armload of food. He picked up a well-worn book of Keats, the name in it Elene Gayle. Who’d have thought that female astronomers read poetry? He climbed into the cockpit, and jammed his heel against the starter pedal.
While the starter motor wound up, he adjusted his helmet, tested oxygen tubes and reduction valve. He set altimeter and clock, put rudder and elevator trim tabs in neutral. He engaged the clutch, and the ancient motor caught with a roar.
Fine drops of oil on the windshield reminded him that it was in need of an overhaul. If there had been time and tools. . . .
“Crazy,” muttered Leigh. “Off to Mars!” Against the roar, he began to whistle Barbara Allen.
While the motor warmed, he pushed in the knob that flattened the pitch of the prop, and planned the take-off. The beach was now a ghostly strip of gray beneath that strange sunrise—too short for all the load the Phoenix carried.
He taxied to the east end of the beach, turned to face the uneasy west wind, plunged into it with a blast of the gun. The ship was far too heavy. Even with the stick forward all the way, the tail wheel still dragged. And the white spray, flying over black teeth of rock beyond the beach, was rushing at him.
But the tail came off the ground. The wheels tapped the sand, lifted, merely flicked the rocks beyond. Leigh caught a long gasping breath. He pushed the knob that started the wheel-retracting pump. The air-speed net die leapt ahead.
Over the dark unquiet sea north of Manumotu, he reeled into the east. Moment by moment, the sky was flaming redder. He watched for the thread of silver in it, and trimmed the elevators to hold a steady climb.
He slid the cockpit cover forward. The air about him was suddenly calm. He felt a moment of relaxation before the crisis ahead. His eyes left the banks of instruments for a moment, found the worn little book beside him.
“Sentimental fool,” he muttered. “Elene Gayle wouldn’t carry dead weight to Mars.”
He slid back the cockpit cover, hurled the volume into the shrieking wind. He was immediately sorry he had done so. He scanned the east again. Still no tornado. Would it fail him now?
The Phoenix was lifting twelve hundred feet a minute. The cockpit grew cold. He plugged in the heater units in his suit. His ears ached. His lungs began to labor in the thinning air. He adjusted the faceplate of his helmet, twisted the oxygen valve.
