Collected short fiction, p.350
Collected Short Fiction, page 350
Without a word of prompting, he checked all the instruments, climbed down through the hatch to inspect the power tubes and the geoflexor circuits in the cramped space beneath the deck, and finally lifted the Pioneer smoothly into the twilight above Manhattan.
“I don’t understand it.” Cartwright shook a bewildered yellow head. “But I know how to fly the ship. Pat’s ideophore is a wonderful gadget.”
“Pat”—Drumm’s voice was grave—“is altogether a wonderful person.”
“YOU love her, don’t you?” Cartwright looked into Drumm’s bronzed face. “Somehow I picked up that impression, along with the science of geodic astrogation.” Drumm’s red head nodded soberly. “My mind must have slipped a moment—it’s hard to forget that you love Pat Wayland. I think all three of us do. I try to make a joke out of it. God help you, if you ever leave yourself open to Pat’s peculiar humor. Mart Worth never says anything, but he keeps her picture, out there on the Moon. But probably it’s the most serious with Galt.”
“And how does Pat feel?”
The Pioneer, just then, lurched upon the brink of a dead pocket. With a swift and almost unconscious skill, Cartwright returned the geoflexors. With no thought of that vertiginous sickness that had troubled him at first, he brought the little ship past the danger, and looked again at Captain Drumm.
“I don’t understand Pat.”
Drumm shrugged.
“Who does? The simplest theory is that the woman in her quarreled with the scientist—and the scientist won. My own theory is that she has something in her life that she never speaks about. I don’t know—”
He sighed, and the red-uniformed shoulders drew straight.
“You avoided that dead pocket very well, Jay. You can pick up the barge at Youngstown and head for the Moon.
I I’m going to sleep.”
He sprawled himself on one of the long seats against the curving hull, and pulled a rug over him.
Cartwright had wondered how hundreds of workmen and thousands of tons of material were carried to the Moon in the tiny Pioneer. Now he knew the answer. They weren’t.
With far more power than was needed to lift herself alone, the little geoflexor served as a tug-boat of space. The “barge” waiting by the night-shrouded railway siding in Ohio was a white-painted forty-foot sphere of welded steel. Cartwright dropped the Pioneer upon it, made fast a magnetic coupling, waved at a bewildered-looking yard clerk, and then soared up into the night, toward the tarnished platter of the waning Moon.
Four hours later, dropping toward the Moon, Cartwright was amazed at the change that a month—and a few of his millions—had made in the central peak of Arzachel, now a hive of activity. Busy figures in white swarmed over the mountain. Big electric-powered caterpillar shovels had already leveled the mile-high summit. And the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble beneath the black mouths of half a dozen tunnels.
A row of white spheres, lying on the pitted crater floor, made quarters for the men. Light awnings covered the machine shops, there. Cable-borne telephers carried workmen and materials to the tunnels and the new mesa above.
Captain Drumm put on a white pressure suit, shook Cartwright’s hand, and climbed out of the Pioneer. Cartwright uncoupled the barge, picked up an empty, and started back to Earth. Dawn was breaking when he dropped the little geoflexor on its terrace in Manhattan, and took a taxi to his hotel.
THAT night he flew another load to the Moon, and every night. He tried to accustom himself to thinking of the Holocaust. Sometimes, after he had waked and breakfasted in the afternoon, he sat for a little while in the hotel lobby, just watching people.
He couldn’t help staring at people, with a kind of horrified fascination. It was terrible to know that all the dates, the deals, the jobs, the shows, the dinners, the shopping tours, the sights, the visits to the Fair—that all those things, seeming so important, meant nothing at all.
Sometimes he was tormented with a wild irrational desire to stand up and scream out the maddening truth: THE HOLOCAUST IS COMING! YOU ARE DOOMED! ALL MEN ARE DOOMED!
But he always held his tongue. Galt was right. It was better that they should enjoy this unsuspecting happiness, until the end. Sometimes he regretted his own shrewd guess—that he must be left outside the citadel, to perish with these thousands that he watched.
But—and it was fortunate, he knew—he had little time for such appalled reflections. Each nightly flight to the Moon took nine or ten hours. And he spent two hours every afternoon in his tiny office, busy with the details of liquidating his fortune and applying it to the vast demands of the work on the Moon.
His admiration for his companions grew. He often saw Mart Worth or Drumm for a few minutes on the Moon; sometimes one or the other of them came back with him for a few days on Earth. And once Pat Wayland went with him to the Moon, accompanied by mysterious crates and boxes from her laboratory.
The wonders of space were still novel to the girl. Lost in the splendor of far-off stars, she seemed to forget her odd resentment at his own admiration. It was no wonder that the others all loved her.
A few things happened, however, that stirred his old mistrust about the Utopia Corporation. One incident concerned the men sent back from the Moon.
These were laborers who, injured or ill or merely tired, asked to be returned to Earth. They were brought back in the big steel barges, or, sometimes when there were only two or three, aboard the Pioneer itself.
And Cartwright was appalled, once, when he asked a hairy dark-faced construction foreman how long he had been at work on the Moon. The man hitched up his overalls and shifted his cud of tobacco and stared.
“The Moon. You plumb crazy, Mister? I ain’t never been out of Ohio in my life, till you give me this plane ride.”
A few other injuries, among the tired men he was disembarking in the darkness on the outskirts of Youngstown, revealed that none of them had any recollection whatever of the months they had labored on the Moon.
And any suggestion of the truth filled them with a curious anger.
That seemed faintly sinister to Cartwright, and he mentioned the matter to Galt.
The big tanned man stood up slowly behind his desk, shaking his unkempt head. It seemed to Cartwright that his broad fatigue-lined face had an expression of deep regret.
“You understand, Jay, that secrecy is essential. We have to preserve it. In the case of these men, or of any of the men involved in our operation, we use another psychological gadget, of Pat’s. You have seen how she can put things in your head, with the ideophore. Well, with the tau-ray, she can take them out just as easily.”
“THERE’S something, about Ji. this,” Cartwright said flatly, “that I don’t like.”
Galt came to him heavily, and took his arm.
“Perhaps I don’t, either, Jay,” his tired voice said. “But it is the only way.” His fingers tightened. “Please, Jay—whatever happens, don’t lose faith in Utopia, Incorporated.”
Cartwright’s faith was very nearly shattered, however, by a newspaper headline. Months had gone. It was spring. The nights had become too short to cover the flights of the Pioneer. He had gone to sleeping aboard on the Moon. He got the paper on one of his midnight trips to Manhattan.
NEBULA THREATENS EARTH!
He read the black streamer with a sinking heart. It must mean that months of effort had been in vain. The secret was out. Now there would be panic. Then, reading the story, he stiffened with a puzzled anger.
The end of the world will come by collision with a stellar nebula, according to an announcement made last night by Dr. Lionel Haught, of Mt. Wilson Observatory.
This menacing object, discovered by Dr. Haught, is a huge spiral cloud of gas and meteoric debris, now located in the direction of the constellation Perseus.
All life, Dr. Haught predicts, will be swept from the solar system by the meteoric rains of the collision. But our generation, he assured reporters, doesn’t have to worry about what will happen when Earth meets nebula.
Because that event won’t take place—if it does at all—for more than two centuries. Dr. Haught’s calculations have placed the probable date of collision as the year 2170 A. D.
Cartwright stared at a blurred halftone. It was the same spiral-armed cloud that Worth had showed him from the observatory on the Moon. And a cold aching sickness grew in his heart.
Galt and the others had tricked him. His guess about the reason for their evasions was obviously wrong. He shook his yellow head, bewilderedly. What was the use in rushing completion of the citadel on the Moon, two hundred years and more ahead of any possible danger?
What, really, was the Utopia Corporation’s great Plan?
Now, Cartwright decided grimly, he was going to find out.
CHAPTER VI
The Vault of Sleep
WITH the newspaper crumpled in a quivering hand, Cartwright walked into the office of Lyman Galt. Hollow-eyed with fatigue, the big director of the Utopia Corporation looked up from his untidy desk.
Cartwright flung the paper down in front of him.
“Well, Galt.” His voice was brittle. “I’ve come this time to get the truth, all of it. You’ve put me off long enough.”
Galt leaned slowly back in the big chair, lacing brown fingers together over his stomach. His broad brown face twisted into a pained grimace. His lips set, and he said nothing.
Cartwright leaned over the desk.
“I had thought,” his tense voice rapped, “that you were evading the truth to spare my feelings—because you had judged me unfit to be saved. But evidently I was mistaken. There have been a good many things I didn’t understand, and several that I didn’t like. Now—if you want my John Henry on any more checks—just what, really, is your Plan?”
For a long time Galt’s hollow, red-rimmed eyes stared fixedly at Cartwright. At last he nodded, as if in decision. His fingers unlaced. A big brown hand fumbled unconsciously in his pocket for pipe and pouch.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you, Jay,” he said. “When you hear, you’ll understand my hesitation.” He gestured with the pipe-stem. “Sit down, Jay.”
Cartwright pulled the chair up close.
“Haught’s conclusions are surprisingly accurate.” Galt touched the black headline. “Worth’s own date for the Holocaust is also 2170. That means we have about two hundred and thirty years to carry out the Plan.”
“If we have over two hundred years,” Cartwright demanded, “why are you rushing to complete the citadel in one?”
“When the Holocaust comes,” Galt said soberly, “the citadel will be no use at all. The surface of the Moon, like that of the Earth, will probably be fused to a depth of thousands of feet. Men can’t live under seas of molten lava.”
He made an ominous little gesture with the unlit pipe.
“No, Jay.” His dark head shook. “There is nothing at all, in the present state of scientific advancement, that offers any hope whatever of survival through the Holocaust.” His voice rang hollowly. “If the Earth passes through the nebula, it will emerge a sterile planet.”
“But perhaps,” Cartwright put, in hopefully, “science, in two hundred and thirty years, will advance far enough to do something about it.”
Galt’s unkempt head shook again.
“I don’t think so—not without our Plan.” His big hand opened the newspapers. “Look here. Nothing but unemployment, graft, strikes, war. No, Jay, the tide of civilization is ebbing again.
“There is another Dark Age ahead—an age of want and pestilence and war and ignorance and degraded barbarism—unless we carry through our Plan.”
“Well?” Cartwright leaned forward. “What is the Plan?”
GALT laid his pipe on the littered desk.
“If you didn’t know Pat and Worth and Captain Drumm—if you hadn’t seen the ideophore and the Pioneer and the beginnings of the citadel—you would scoff at the Plan. But I think you have been prepared.”
“I’m expecting something pretty remarkable,” Cartwright admitted. “Let’s have it.”
Galt rose, with an odd and somehow ominous little smile.
“We have a barge load of equipment and chemicals ready to go to the Moon,” he said. “I’ll send Pat out with you, to demonstrate exactly how the Plan is to work.”
Some grave undertone in his voice sent a tremor up and down Cartwright’s spine.
“Can’t you just tell me? Now?”
Galt beckoned him inexorably toward the door.
“Pat will be ready in half an hour.”
Cartwright waited impatiently on the terrace, above the lights and the subdued endless sound of the city. Pat Wayland appeared at last, stumbling under a huge carton marked “Fragile.” He helped her with it, and she thanked him with a sweetness that, for once, seemed unalloyed with poison.
“Now?” he said. “About the Plan?”
“Don’t ask questions,” she advised him sweetly. “I’ll show you, on the Moon.”
“All right,” he said. “But no more tricks.”
The Pioneer lifted above the city’s sprawling lights. Softly drumming, it settled into a roofless abandoned warehouse in Newark, to pick up the loaded barge. As it boomed away, toward the Moon, Pat Wayland stood near Cartwright, looking into space.
“Splendid, isn’t it, Jay?” Her voice was soft with awe. “It’s terrible and inspiring and beautiful. Perhaps, if our Plan goes through, men will live to look upon it for a million years. Perhaps they will even become a real part of it, and not just a few insignificant vermin clinging to a mote of dust.”
The throb of the geodes abruptly faltered. The little ship lurched, at the edge of a dead pocket, so that the girl was flung against Cartwright. As his hands moved, with a practiced and almost unconscious skill, to keep them out of the perilous dead area, he was aware of the warm vibrant contact of her body. Her blond fragrant hair I brushed his face.
She laughed, softly, with a murmured apology.
“You know, Jay, this is like one of those rides at Coney Island.”
He caught her arm, steadied her. “Pat,” he whispered, “you’re human tonight. I really believe you have a heart.”
Her blue eyes went dark with pain. “I had one,” she said softly. “Once.”
“Don’t you think you could find it again?” He saw her sharp little gesture, and went on hastily. “Even if not for me—though you must know I love you, Pat. I tried not to fall for you—I knew it would be no dice. But I—I do love you.”
He saw her face, in the pale rays of the growing Moon, and it was stony white.
“Don’t any of us have a chance?” he I asked her. “You know that Drumm loves you—and tries to hide it, with his banter. Don’t you know that Mart Worth treasures your picture, among his astronomical plates? Don’t you realize that Galt is eating his heart out for you—and never saying a word?”
“Do you think I don’t know?”
THE little sound she made began like a sob, but it ended with a little silvery laugh. Cartwright shrugged, wearily.
“All right, Pat. If you want to be the goddess of science—go ahead!” Her smooth face flushed, and wrath smouldered in her eyes.
“When you are angry,” he told her, “you look more beautiful than ever.”
“Cliché.” Her voice had its old infuriating sugar-sweetness. “Perhaps Drumm should give you another lesson, with the ideophore. Now, I’ve work to do.”
She went back to the folding desk at the rear of the deck, and Cartwright tried to keep his mind on the job of taking the Pioneer safely out to the Moon.
“Whatever bit Pat,” he told himself, “it wasn’t the love-bug.” He stared at the mottled, expanding globe ahead. “Or maybe it was!”
The Pioneer dropped toward the stark, high-walled plain of Arzachel. Thrusting out its black triangle of shadow, the central peak lifted swiftly.
The citadel, during these months of labor, had taken swift form. An immense disk of white concrete crowned the flattened summit. A smaller disk, upon it, left a circular terrace. The dome of Worth’s observatory rose from the center of the upper disk.
Cartwright set the white barge upon the lower terrace. Stevedores in bulky white suits swarmed out of valves in the curving wall, to unload it. He dropped the Pioneer in its own cradle, locked and sealed the valves, and grinned back at Pat.
“All right, diamond lady,” he said. “I’m ready to be told about your Plan.”
Captain Drumm and Martin Worth were waiting for them in the corridor within. Magnificent as ever in a new crimson uniform, Drumm seized the girl’s hand.
“Welcome, darling, to our little love-nest on the Moon. We’ve got your room all decorated. It is pink, with a frieze of Cupids—”
“Wouldn’t you like it for yourself?” Pat asked sweetly. “But—is Jay’s room ready?”
“Eh?” It seemed to Cartwright that Captain Drumm and the little astronomer looked at one another with something like consternation. “Of course—but why?”
“We must show it to him,” the girl said, limpidly. “It seems that Jay has been asking some questions about the Plan, and Lyman agreed to let him have a demonstration.”
“Oh!” The voice of Captain Drumm sounded queerly hollow. “Of course.”
Cartwright glimpsed the sharpened V of the little astronomer’s brows, his expression of satanic amusement. Suddenly Cartwright shuddered. He couldn’t help feeling that something was very much wrong.
“Well, darling, see you afterwards,” said Captain Drumm. He added, too hastily, “Both of you, of course.”
Grinning sardonically, Worth lifted his thin hand in a little parting gesture.
“This way,” said Pat Wayland. “The vaults are the first thing you must see, and they are nine thousand feet below.”
UNEASILY, Cartwright followed her into the small cage of an automatic elevator. It dropped, free. Cartwright clutched a hand rail to keep from bumping his head on the ceiling.
