Collected short fiction, p.325
Collected Short Fiction, page 325
All my father’s desperate threats and promises—even the ingenious hint that a space fleet was on its way from Earth to rescue him and conquer Mars—proved in vain. Anak grimly resigned him to “the judgment of the Sun.”
The Martians kept his beast, stripped him of weapons and clothing, and finally released him, naked and alone, in the midst of a sand desert far southward of Ob. This was remote from the usual haunts of the outlaw’s, and death of thirst and exposure seemed a certainty—-until Trent, who had been spying from the sky, picked him up with the captured ship.
Two nights later, with Zynlid and a picked band of his men, they landed the ship on the topmost terrace of the Sun temple. Under the feeble spark of Phobos, creeping backward across the sky, they slaughtered the surprised temple guard. My father led the howling bandits dowm into the ancient pile. They found Anak, standing beneath a glowing yellow disk in a chapel of the Sun. He fought savagely, gravely wounding the outlaw chief. But my father snatched away his lance, and he was dragged aboard the vessel before the roused horde of warriors could reach the roof from the temple courtyard.
The ship launched upward with bullets ringing against her hull. Triumphantly, my father commanded Anak to answer Trent’s excited questions. But the wrinkled old priest refused to talk. Cheerfully jesting, the outlaws began to apply torture. But the seamed dark face merely stiffened stoically.
It was Zynlid, after Trent had patched up his wounds, who solved the difficulty.
“He will never talk willingly,” rasped the old bandit. “Give him this. It is a key to locked lips.”
And he handed Trent a tiny hypodermic, loaded with a few drops of some colorless liquid. The drug seemed to resemble scopolamine in being a sort of “truth serum.” It ended Anak’s stubborn silence, and Trent at last began to learn the secret of the blue power dust.
THE OLD PRIEST was kept drugged for nearly two months, constantly questioned—except on one occasion, when the injection must have failed to take effect. Then, feigning the influence of the drug, he told a series of clever lies and pretended to demonstrate another secret of the dust. Only my father’s vigilance and a sudden tackle prevented an explosion that would have annihilated them all.
Finally, they took Anak into the colossal metal hull of the Korduv. The frantic searchers from Ob somehow discovered their presence there. My father closed the lofty entrance valve, and, with Zynlid and his band, held it for three weeks against the desperate attackers, while Trent questioned the drugged ruler, explored all the mysterious depths of that ancient desert enigma, and made complete plans of all its colossal mechanisms.
Slowly, the astronomer pieced together the solution to the riddles of the blue dust and the Korduv and the limitless power that drove the engines of Mars—and found it an astounding revelation. The strange granules, which they came to call “sunstone,” had come, quite literally, from the Sun!
Trent came at last to my father, in the beleaguered valve, trembling with the import of his discoveries.
“This is a ship!” he made the startling announcement. “The Korduv is an interplanetary ship. It was built nearly half a million Martian years ago, when the planet was at its peak of civilization. It has made thirty trips to the Sun, at intervals of ten or twenty thousand years, for sunstone.”
“Sunstone?” echoed my father. “The power-dust?”
“Pure power!” cried the scientist. “Frozen, portable power—power storage, perfected to the last degree. It is condensed radiant energy—a complex, not of atoms and electrons, but of pure photons.
“Light particles, fixed! The mathematics of it is revolutionary. A radical extension of quantum physics! It also accounts for the gravity-reflecting space warp that lifts the ship, and the same field of strain can be modified to reflect radiant energy, for protection against any excess of the solar radiations.
“With a crew of two thousand Martians—the race, in those days, was more numerous and more venturesome—the Korduv was navigated a hundred and forty million miles into the solar photosphere. For ten years it floated there, its crew protected by the fields from a gravitation eighty times that of Mars. Its conversion cells absorbed the energy of the Sun, at a rate that amounts to fifty horsepower per square inch, solidified it into the photon dust. And finally, when the ordeal of heat was ended, the survivors—usually not a tenth of the crew—came back with the precious load of sunstone.”
“Eh!” My father stared at Trent, digesting this. A dull hammering throbbed faintly through the colossal valve. His weary, bearded face set with triumphant decision. “A ship!” he whispered. “Then we’ll take it to Earth, unload what dust is left, and send it to the Sun for more.”
TRENT SHOOK his shaggy, emaciated head. “The Korduv won’t move again,” he said. “It was damaged in the last voyage—that was fifty thousand years ago. Some of the cells failed, and unconverted energy cooked most of the crew and fused half the field coils. A narrow escape from falling into the Sun. The rest of the coils, overloaded, were pretty well burned up on the way back. The thing crashed here. The rest of its crew were killed, but the sun-stone was intact.”
“Wrecked, eh?” My father stared into the strange maze of Cyclopean engines that loomed within the faintly blue-lit gloom beyond the valve, and demanded, “Why didn’t they build another?”
“Racial senescence, I guess,” said Trent. “They stopped growing, and went to seed. Take old Anak. He knows scientific facts that we wouldn’t have discovered, on Earth, for a thousand years. But they’re frozen, dead. His knowledge is all in the form of elaborate, memorized rituals, mingled with superstitious dogma. He is ruled by the past. Half his knowledge is too sacred to use outside the temple. Any new fact would be rank heresy to the Sun. There is sunstone left to keep the pumps running for two or three thousand years. After that, Mars is doomed. ‘By the will of the Sun.’ ”
“Well!” My father shrugged impatiently. “If this is wrecked, can you draw plans for another?”
“For a better one, Hammond,” Trent assured him. “If we were back on Earth.”
“First thing,” my father observed, “we’ve got to get past our fanatical friends on the outside—but Hammond Power has gone up a thousand points!”
While the partisans of Anak continued to batter at the great valve, Trent spent three days fitting the little red ship for the Earthward voyage. Its double hull already sealed hermetically, the dusky depths of the Korduv yielded cylinders of oxygen, bottled for fifty thousand years. The hold was filled with sunstone, and certain changes in the wiring of the field coils adapted its drive for the interplanetary trip.
Then a tiny sunstone bomb opened a new port in the crown of the Korduv’s hull. The little red vessel darted out through the gaping plates, escaped the ray batteries and aircraft of the attackers, and fled safely through darkness to the outlaw’s hidden ravine.
Old Anak, with his infant daughter, was released at dawn on the desert a few miles from Ob. He learned now that the mother of Asthore had been killed, and he retained memory of all that he had revealed beneath the drug. Rage and horror overwhelmed him. His drawn, dark-scaled face twisted hideously, and his black eyes flamed. He made a desperate, empty-handed attack on my father, screaming prayers and curses.
“Beware!” he was shrieking, as the vessel rose. “Desecrators of the holy fire, beware the judgment of the Sun!”
Zynlid had accepted my father’s invitation to visit Earth, with a slave and his two favorite wives. A final raid supplied the vessel with food for the voyage, and Trent guided it out past Deimos into the gulf of space.
The whole Martian year was already gone. Earth had passed conjunction and was pulling swiftly ahead on its orbit. The rocket could never have overtaken it—but half an ounce of sun-stone drove the Martian flier eighty million miles in only ten days.
In November, 2134, the red ship landed safely in a cornfield near New York. My father announced triumphantly that he had secured the secret of Mars—a cheap source of illimitable power.
III.
I CAN STILL remember how my mother trembled, in her cool, silent, sweet-smelling room, above the twilit Aegean, as her frail, unsteady hand snapped the new visivox spool into the cabinet.
“Now, Chan,” she whispered, “you . . . your father!”
She choked, and I knew that she was crying.
The little screen flickered and lighted. I saw the golden tangle of the broken stalks of corn, and the tiny ship from Mars lying across the rows, like twin red spindles side by side. A small door opened, and Trent and my father came out.
They were queer-looking men, haggard and shaggy and darkly tanned. My father wore the strange leather garments of the nomads, brilliant with the dried, shell-like ear appendages he had taken. He flourished a long red lance, and his voice croaked a guttural greeting in an unfamiliar tongue.
But his old smile flashed, infectious as ever, behind the great tangle of his black beard. His strong teeth shone. His gray eyes had squinted a little, against the desert glare, but still they were clear and shrewd and quick.
“He’s just the same, Chan,” sobbed my mother. “Your father . . . oh, Garth!”
Her thin face was white, and I saw the great tears on her cheeks.
Newsmen shot swift, excited questions, and visivox machines were humming. My father bowed grandly, and then beckoned. The Martians came scrambling after him—gaunt, rusty-red Zynlid and his varicolored, red-crowned companions. Their movements were awkward and laborious, and their breathing seemed troubled. They blinked bewilderedly at the feverish, barking newsmen. Garth Hammond stepped before them, and bowed again, and made a little speech of greeting to the Earth.
“To every man,” he promised, “I will bring more power than a king enjoyed of old. Tomorrow, the Sun Power Corporation—”
Then Nada Vale, the red-haired actress, came running into the picture. With an eager, muffled cry, she threw herself into my father’s great tanned arms. His old smile flashed eagerly. He lifted her, and crushed his great black beard against her face.
Then, suddenly, my mother stopped the machine. A moment she stood beside the cabinet, frozen, her face set and white. A thin sob burst from her quivering lips. She ran quickly out of the room. I found her sitting in the darkness on a terrace high above the black sea where the stars danced and vanished, shaking to dry, breathless sobs.
The conqueror of Mars became the hero of the Earth. That wild tide of enthusiasm drowned all the old accusations against my father. The capital of six billion dollars, for the Sun Power Corporation, was all subscribed in one hectic day.
Tens of millions paid fat admission fees to see Znylid and his ménage, in the gravity-shielded, air-conditioned apartment my father provided. The old bandit used to strut proudly before the curious, flourishing his weapons and trophies, and demanding staggering sums for posing for the visivox.
THE TEMPEST of publicity seemed to mean nothing to Ared Trent. The public hardly realized that my father had had a companion on Mars. Stern, taciturn priest of science, if Trent had a human side, the world didn’t know it—not then. He gathered sixty skilled draftsmen, in a closely guarded office building, and began drawing up the plans and specifications for the Sun Power Station.
Far smaller than the ancient Korduv on Mars—only a thousand feet in diameter and fifteen hundred long—the Station was still the greatest engineering feat ever attempted on Earth. The construction took over three years. Directly and indirectly, more than a million men were employed on it. The first six billions were spent, and bonds floated for three billions more.
Unlike the Martian plant, the Station was intended to float permanently in the Sun’s fiery atmosphere. Ships shielded by special fields would visit it at yearly intervals, to carry supplies and relief to its crew, and bring away the precious sunstone. Eight hundred volunteers were selected, to spend one or two years exiled to the flaming terror of the Sun.
Designer of the Station, Ared Trent was to have been its first commander. But, a few months before the Station was ready to be launched, came the historic break between my father and Trent.
That quarrel has puzzled historians. The two had been friends since before my father sent Trent to the Moon. Man of knowledge and man of money, they had seemed to live in a perfect symbiosis. Biographers have suggested, and rightly, I believe, that Trent, although he seemed to have the feelings of a product intergraph, actually must have suppressed a deep resentment of my father’s assumption of a dictatorial superiority.
But the real key to the quarrel, I think, is the suicide of Nada Vale. The actress had obviously been desperately in love with my father. Absorbed at the time in the expedition to Mars and the conquest of power, he can hardly have cared very much for her. It is certain that they were never married. And it seems that she was bitterly jealous of the woman my father did love.
That woman was lovely Doris Wayne, heir to the Marine Mines billions. My father met her soon after the return from Mars. They were married in 2138. On the wedding night, Nada Vale drank poison in the anteroom of their Manhattan penthouse.
And Ared Trent, although no one had guessed it, cherished an old infatuation for the actress. She had promised years before to marry him, it seems, if he came back alive from the Moon—perhaps only with a professional eye to future publicity. But, before he came back, she met his backer, my father. Trent was forgotten. And he concealed his deep injury until her suicide broke his old restraint.
At any rate, Trent suddenly demanded an equal voice with my father in the direction of the Sun Power Corporation. My father refused, astonished. There was a long legal battle, in which Trent was completely defeated. Then my father, to show some gratitude for his services, made him a free gift of ten million dollars. Trent used it to build a new laboratory isolated in. South Africa, and went into complete seclusion.
COMMAND of the Station, meantime, was given to bluff, stocky Tom Cornwall, hero of the Moon. Sitting with my mother in our island villa, I watched the launching of the Station. It was a colossal upright cylinder of massive steel, with curved ends. Incredibly tremendous, it loomed above tiny-seeming tracks and derricks, and the mills and furnaces of the new steel city that had made its metal. The crew had gone aboard. My father, magnificent on the platform, made a speech and shook the hand of Tom Cornwall. The intrepid captain vanished. The cheering multitude—people small and black as crawling insects about the Station—were herded back. Then the steel cylinder flickered curiously, and was lost in a pillar of silver haze—all light reflected by its shielding ether fields. The pillar floated upward. A sudden wind swept the throng, raising a little cloud of dust and hats. And the Station was gone to the Sun.
There was rioting, that day, on all the stock exchanges. Coal, oil, and water-power stocks dropped ruinously. SPC soared to dizzy heights. A dozen desperate investors killed themselves. My father boasted that in one day, before any wealth had come from the Sun, he had cleared nearly two billion dollars.
The great relief ship, the Solarion, was built that year in the same Ohio yards. I was not ten years old when it came back from its first voyage to the Sun. It brought hundreds of tons of the wondrous blue substance, frozen power, that went on the market at twelve hundred dollars an ounce.
Garth Hammond’s star seemed to be shining very brightly. There was hardly a hint of the storm of trouble and disaster that rose with the passing years, to bend his strong shoulders, bleach his hair, ruin SPC, and even to bring all the solar system to the very threshold of disaster.
But gnarled old Zynlid and his three companions from Mars, in their gravity-shielded tank, were already dead of the Falling Sickness.
IV.
THE FRIGHTFUL shadow of the old pandemic suddenly darkened over all the world. For something had happened to the virus: some reaction, physiologists said, of the malignant molecule with the alien proteins in the bodies of the Martians. Old immunities were destroyed. The new, virulent plague swept the planet. In a single year, a hundred million died. All the horrors of the Black Century threatened to return.
Among the natives of Mars the disease was even more deadly than on Earth. When my father’s conquering fleet appeared on the red planet, the cities attempted to resist and the Korduv was blown up. It is uncertain whether, as enemies of my father have charged, the Falling Sickness was deliberately spread. But, within a few weeks, it destroyed half the inhabitants of Mars. The planet surrendered. Anak, the old priest-king, was forced into exile. He came to Earth, with his daughter, and established residence in a shabby, century-old building in Washington. His brooding, bitter hatred of my father always grew, and his guarded inner rooms, armored against the gravity and the air of Earth, were an early center of the organized intrigue against Garth Hammond and the SPC.
My father had brought the Martians to Earth. He was to blame, therefore, for the new epidemic. And the Martians hated him doubly, as the desecrator of their solar religion and the murderer of their race.
Agitators made him responsible, too, for the horde of new economic ills that threatened to crush the very life from the planet. The epidemic alone, with its fears, illness, and death, was enough to cause vast depression. Added to that was the financial panic and industrial disturbances occasioned by the destruction of the old power industries and the rise of SPC.
Yet—and an item to my father’s credit—industry must have been stimulated vastly by the exploitation of the other planets. After the conquest of Mars, the new space fleets of SPC explored the Moon, Venus, Mercury, and, the satellites of Jupiter. The parent corporation proliferated into a thousand subsidiary development, concessions, mineral, planting, transport, even news and amusement enterprises. There was even a Martian Copyright & Patents Corporation, to exploit the arts and sciences of that ancient planet.
SPC was suddenly the most powerful—and soon the most hated—entity on Earth. The yearly production of sun-stone from the Station ran above one thousand tons. At the standard price, pegged mercilessly at twelve hundred dollars an ounce, that meant a gross annual revenue in excess of forty billion dollars—enough to make Garth Hammond virtual dictator of the Solar System.
