Collected short fiction, p.394
Collected Short Fiction, page 394
Jeremy felt himself flush. He hoped the tan that the power tubes had burned deep in his skin would hide the embarrassing surge of color.
“Perhaps I am,” he said unwillingly. “I want to do my share.”
Mark Drake tapped the polished desk, his severe eyes coldly estimating the steel that lay beneath Jeremy’s lean body.
“The job is yours,” he said suddenly. “You’re a good mole-man. You may get through. If you do, it will make quite a little hero of you.” The gray eyes were merciless. “But I want to remind you, Jerry, of just one thing.”
The Power Regent stood up behind the desk, and now even his lips ceased to smile.
“Just remember that Gay Ferrand is mine.” For all its hardness, his voice was pitched low and quiet. “She likes you, Jerry. We’re friends—all three of us. But Gay is mine.”
Jeremy felt a sudden fierce tension in his throat that strangled back his reply.
GAY was the daughter of Paul Ferrand, the discoverer of the Blot, and builder of the Outside Station. Her father had spent twenty years in that strange citadel, at work on some mysterious research. His final disappearance from the Station still remained a sinister riddle.
Because of her father’s unexplained vanishing, Gay had been brought up in the Drake household in New Chicago. She, Mark and Jeremy were childhood friends.
On the last night, before leaving to begin the hazardous task of opening the tunnel to the Station, Jeremy took Gay to dinner at the Gnome. A tiny, crowded, expensive place it was on the refuge city’s aristocratic, topmost level.
Gay sat close to Jeremy at the little table. Light shimmered and flowed on the dark waves of her hair. Her eyes looked dark and sober, her skin very pale. Jeremy’s eyes drank in the sweetness of her, and then went dim with grimly damned moisture.
“Gay—Gay—” he blurted. “I love you!” For a moment her white face seemed luminous. Then a shadow fell upon it.
“Let’s not talk of love.” He saw the gleam of tears in her eyes. “Because—if the Sun comes back—I’m going to marry Mark. We’ve planned that, you know. Always.” Jeremy nodded against his will. Her father and Mark’s had been the great men, the leaders. His was a mere nobody. But inwardly, ever since he was old enough to understand its cruel discrimination, he had rebelled against the traditional superiority of birth.
“Gay.” His voice went husky. “Do you love Mark?”
Her eyes grew dark and solemn, thoughtful for a long moment of silence.
“I do,” she whispered at last. “I think I do. At least I know that he loves me.” She shook her head unhappily. “But let’s not talk about it—please.”
Jeremy told her, then, that he had volunteered to repair the Station. Her dark eyes went wide. Fear chilled her white face, and her hands groped tremblingly for his.
“No!” she cried breathlessly. “Jerry, you mustn’t!”
“Somebody must,” he replied without raising his tone. “And, Gay, perhaps”—he looked for a long time into her tense, stricken face—“I’ll find out what happened to your father.”
“No, Jeremy, you’ll never find him,” she denied faintly. “You see, there’s something I’ve never told anybody. Dad made me promise secrecy. But I must tell you. Dad was desperately afraid of something. What it was, I don’t know. But it was something that might keep the Sun from ever coming back!”
JEREMY’S mouth opened in a protest that did not come.
“I know what happened to him,” she whispered. “He was building a space machine. A sky-sled, he called it. He flew off with it, to learn about whatever he feared. And he was lost somewhere in the Blot!”
Her trembling hand clung to his.
“Jerry, I’m so afraid the Sun will never come back.”
“It has to,” Jeremy reassured her. “Your father himself promised that it would. Anyhow, I’m going to repair the Station. We’ll know before long—if I do succeed where all the others were destroyed.”
But her apprehension followed Jeremy aboard the mole. It stalked him through the days, the weeks, the months of labor to open the shattered tunnel. It still oppressed him when at last the big wheel cut through to the elevator shaft beneath the Station.
What had been Ferrand’s secret fear? Was it possible that the Sun might not return? What would the first glimpse of the Outside be like?
CHAPTER II
Dreadful Sight
HAUNTING dread paralyzed Jeremy’s eagerness as he clambered into his pressure suit of stiff fabric. His exploration crew of three men was ready. Now he signaled with a bulky arm. The wheel-man opened the valve.
Jeremy climbed out of the mole, into the black, frigid vacuum of the elevator shaft. The tube-man and the grease-monkey followed, unrolling a power cable which they quickly connected to the elevator. The little cage lifted them into black and frozen mystery.
The Station was a two-hundred foot cylinder, armored against quakes, meteors and cold. Despite its armor it was a fortress that constantly stood in great peril. For Earth trembled in the endless violence of the Fault’s shifting stresses, and the crystallized atmosphere was no longer a shield against the meteors that hailed out of the sky’s mad chaos.
Most of the Station was buried under rock, and frozen soil, ice, and mountains of crystalline air. Only an insulated dome reared above that dead, night-shrouded desert, supporting the beacon that for three decades had been the only point of light on Earth.
Moving stiffly in the heavy vacuum armor, Jeremy began a hurried tour of inspection. The lost scientist, Paul Ferrand, had designed well. The Station was intact, excepting the damage the meteor had done.
Jeremy cringed beneath the weight of the terrible stillness. In the vacuum, even his own steps made no sound. His hand torch radiated no light against the leering dark, though crystals of ice and solid air flittered on the floors. Deadly cold probed into his armor.
They reached the power room. Looking up, they saw the enormous hole that had been torn in the roof. Draped over the control panel, in a curiously ungraceful attitude, sat a rigid body. Its inflexible hands grasped a switch.
Beneath a shattered converter tube, they saw the gray, jagged mass of meteoric iron lodged deep in the broken durite pier.
“Meteor smashed the power tube,” the tube-man reported to Jeremy. His voice, on the short wave communicator, sounded hoarse and strange. “Air escaped. The men died before they could start the auxiliary. Maybe I can get it going.”
TORCH held before him, Jeremy climbed ahead of the wheel-man into the shops and laboratories. There, for twenty years, Paul Ferrand had worked at his mysterious research. The circle of light found something that shocked him cold with horror.
A still figure sat at a desk, head supported in its palms in an attitude almost of contemplation. But agony was frozen on the white features.
Shuddering, Jeremy dropped his light to the open notebook on the desk. Its precise rows of symbols were meaningless hieroglyphs. Paul Ferrand’s private cypher, he knew, had never been decoded.
Trembling to something more terrible than the savage cold that seeped through the insulation of his suit, Jeremy led the climb again. High above Earth, he and the wheelman reached the observation dome.
The meteor had ripped straight through it. A ragged hole yawned in steel, durite and insulation-fiber. Beneath, in the floor, gaped another splintered opening. Beside it lay nothing more than the hand and arm of the man who had been on duty here. The fingers still clutched a half-burned CRO cigarette.
Jeremy paused for just one glance. He stumbled eagerly to that jagged hole. Hopefully he peered up through it—and stood nerveless, stricken.
The wheel-man touched his bulky sleeve. “Has the Sun come back?”
Voiceless, Jeremy could only point with his armored arm. The sky was utterly black, as it had been for thirty years. No light was diffused through the atmosphere they had hoped to see.
Gay Ferrand’s terrible premonition was appallingly confirmed. The Blot still smothered Earth! The Sun had not come back!
Jeremy’s stunned mind fumbled blankly with the cosmic riddle of the Blot. Seeking some solution, some hope of life, his dazed thoughts ran back to the coming of the catastrophe, as his father had described it.
* * * * *
A THIRD of a century ago, little Morley Cord had listened to Drake and Ferrand.
He asked lisping questions. Jeremy could almost see him, mild blue eyes wide with bewildered wonderment.
“There’s no hope at all,” Ferrand kept wearily repeating, “unless Drake can work a miracle.”
Morley Cord locked himself all night in a hotel room on Adderley Street, with a portable typewriter and a quart of Scotch. Dawn had picked out Devil’s Peak and Signal Hill, when he staggered into a cable office and filed the fateful story.
“Three years to live!” the world’s papers screamed.
There was a day of panic, with rioting in the streets and all business suspended. Then a hundred prominent scientists claimed that since the ether did not exist, it therefore could not develop flaws. Through all the northern hemisphere, Octans was safely out of sight, so the football season recaptured the front pages.
Two of the precious years had passed when Morley Cord limped into Drake’s new laboratory—a low tin-roofed building, secluded on a wooded New Jersey hill. There Drake still labored to find the needed miracle.
The tall engineer was more stooped than ever, his cragged face haggard. He led Cord into a locked, silent room.
“There it is—the one hope!”
Starting a humming motor-generator, he pointed to a cone-shaped quartz tube. A tiny metal bead, inside, glowed bright yellow. It rose into a cage of gleaming wires and hung suspended there.
“It’th like—” Cord caught his breath. “It’th like a tiny thun!”
Drake nodded his silvered head. “That’s what it is. A tiny atomic sun!”
“How—” Cord was trembling almost voiceless. “How—”
“Those little coils create a sub-space about the metal bead,” Drake told him. “They warp space itself to form a tiny sphere—in effect, a tiny universe—strong enough to withstand unthinkable pressure and millions of degrees of heat.
“The solar reaction takes place inside. Atoms are stripped of orbital electrons, mangled, broken down into energy, very much as in the actual Sun.” He pointed at a quivering needle. “There’s the output. Nearly six hundred horsepower.”
“What,” Cord shouted. “You’ve got the answer!”
CORD was almost ready to dance for joy, but the engineer’s next words halted him.
“Look at the input. Six-ten,” Drake said wearily. “The subspace can also be described as a fixed spherical wave. But I have failed to make it stable. It takes energy to maintain it. All the output, plus two percent more.”
“Two percent? That’s not much,” Cord soothed.
“Enough! In the other direction, two percent would mean life for the world. Power to dig ample refuges, in which men could remain alive. It would even make us independent of the Sun! We wouldn’t have to care whether the Fault passed or not.” Cord caught his arm. “Surely, just two percent—”
“I’ve run twelve thousand samples,” Drake replied defeatedly. “Two percent seems to be the limit.”
His further efforts brought bitter, complete failure.
When the Ether Fault overtook the Earth, it came with appalling abruptness. One night the Blot had hardly spread beyond the faint stars of Octans. The next night brought hideous black terror to the northern hemisphere.
Just before dawn, Morley Cord was flying from western New Jersey to New York. He saw the blades of darkness stab up from the south. The stars turned a pale green, then an eerie violet. For an instant they twisted into insanely shifting constallations—and went out!
Only a diminishing scrap of the northernmost sky remained undevoured. Cord guided himself by Polaris, hoping that before long the dawn would show him New York. The dawn came, but the Sun rose an hour too soon—
And what a Sun!
It was insanely elongated, an immense egg-shape. One end of it was rose-colored, the other an uncanny violet. The violet end, as Cord watched, thrust out a long, branching pseudopod, and slowly turned green.
Then a tiny red dot came into the middle of the green. It became a frightful scarlet mask, before its leering grin turned black.
That was the first insane prank of the Ether Fault. Then darkness utterly blotted out the Sun.
SO began the Night of Terror. Men had tried to shrug off the alarms of Ferrand and Drake, either with fatalism or a jesting skepticism. But the Night brought awful conviction.
Terror! The Sun’s mad extinction. Total, choking darkness. The failure of most electrical equipment—radios, telephones, even lights. Monstrous terror stalked in the horrible blackness.
The most appalling disasters came from the unpredictable disturbances of gravitation. The Earth’s crust yielded to shifting stresses. Incredibly violent quakes leveled cities. Tidal waves drowned the coastal lands. Millions died that night.
And insane, frightful things maddened those who survived. The force of gravity was freakishly reversed. Men and vehicles, buildings and ships fell upward! Sometimes they came back in deluges of mud and debris. More often they were lost forever in the chaos of the Fault.
But all the terror of that warning night was caused merely by an outflung arm of the Blot, which Earth had chanced to pass. Presently a tiny violet star came into the blackness. Green spiral rays whirled fantastically from it, until it exploded into a burst of rosy lances.
The Sun shone once more.
Broadcasting from Cape Town, when radio waves carried again, Ferrand assured the world that the Night had been only a sign. There would be a few months of respite, and then thirty years of frigid dark.
Morley Cord found himself near the tip of Greenland. His battered plane had been flung three thousand miles by the freakish hurricanes of the Night. He flew back to the stunned world, sought Leland Drake’s observatory.
Pacing a floor littered with cigarette butts, the tall engineer was locked away from clamoring reporters.
“It’s no use, Cord.” His voice was nothing more than a weary croak. “I’ve run nineteen thousand samples. Every isotope of every element, in every significant combination—”
“Ith—ithotope!” Cord jerked a smoky yellow-green crystal from his watch chain. “Here’s one you didn’t try!”
“Eh?” Drake shook his head. “That’s just an odd-colored monazite.”
“More than the color ith odd,” Cord told him. “The thereum in it hath a math-number of one-forty-eight.”
“Impossible! The distribution of the isotopes in nature is uniform. Cereum is one-forty and one-forty-two.”
“Tetht it!” Cord demanded.
“I’ll test it,” Drake agreed without conviction. “But I’ll only prove you’re wrong.”
HALF an hour later, though, his hollow eyes were burning feverishly. He watched a tiny yellow bead rise into its cage of shining wires, and there turn brilliantly blue. He looked at the dials, rasped out a breathless cry.
“Output six-twenty!” He juggled a key, incredulously. “Input only five-ninety. That means thirty horsepower of free energy—power to save mankind!” He clutched Cord’s arm. “Where did you get that crystal?”
“The Marudu region in Borneo,” Cord told him. “There’th jutht a pocket of the stuff in an odd little crater. Geologithts believe it’th a meteoric depothit. Oneth I wath preth agent for a conthern dealing in gold mineth in Borneo. When I found out the propertieth were thalted, they paid me off with a worthleth claim.”
“Worthless?” echoed Drake. “It’s worth everything!”
Cord hastily deeded the deposit to the Emergency Council.
“It wath worth nothing to me,” he said modestly. “And thith ith a time when every man mutht do hith share.”
A flight of American bombing planes carried Drake’s mining expedition to Borneo. In a short time they brought back the first heavy bags of the precious greenish crystals.
Material Energy!
A month later, the first full-size ME-converter tube stood tall as a man, the blue marble of its solar element flaming like a tiny sun. It yielded ten thousand horsepower of free energy.
Then men swiftly migrated underground. ME-powered excavators bored into the planet’s crust. Cone-shaped mounds of debris rose about huge, deep elevator shafts. Then Drake invented the atomic furnace. Its crucible was simply a larger subspace. Finally he discovered the process of fusing waste rock from the tunnels into dense adamantine durite. This was the wondrous material that made the shafts almost indestructible.
The shaken hope of men mounted high again. Life went on, though not as before. Humanity simply adapted itself to the violent change.
Drake found time to announce his engagement to Jane Baylor, daughter of the financier who had first backed the Emergency Council. Morley Cord astonished his friends by eloping with Drake’s platinum-haired secretary.
The second extinction of the Sun was less abrupt than the first. But it was even more terrible. Day by day, the Sun lost its brightness as if some strange screen were thickening before it. Eldritch colors tinged it. The orb wavered and flickered to the Fault’s strange distortion, like a reflection in a muddled pool.
CHAPTER III
Retreat Below
UNCANNILY the purple dusk had dimmed into awful night. The Sun was gone, and with it went the Moon and the stars. The sky remained utterly black, for no dawn could come while the Blot kept its grip. Earth lost its precious heat. The cold of outer space dropped its deathly hand upon dark seas, hills and plains. Men had no choice but furious burrowing into the Earth.
Mountains of rubble grew above the wastes of new snow. ME-driven tractors lumbered through the night, dragging sledge-trains laden with refugees and their goods. Men retreated in perfect order, at first. But then the orderly retreat degenerated to a frantic rout, for disaster struck ruthlessly.
