COSMIC CARAVAN

  By ED WESTON

  Amid the muck and torrential storms of Venus, a greed-mad band of space adventurers fights a

  soul-shaking battle in a tempestuous rush for the possession of boundless wealth!

  A COMPLETE INTERPLANETARY NOVELET

  CHAPTER I

  Expedition to Venus

  I WAS in McGurk’s Bar trying to conjure a story out of a whisky glass when Hansen prowled in and drew me to a booth. Lifted me, would be more accurate. He had a hard, rock-miner’s shoulders, that man. The rest of him consisted of fists like hams, a chin like a grand piano, and wide blue eyes shedding the human kindness of a wolf.

  “For the last ten years they’ve been experimenting with space ships,” he said. “How many of them have really worked?”

  “One,” I told him. “If you call it working. Apparently, Hugo Thomas got to Venus and returned near enough to Earth to radio about it. Then he vanished.”

  Hansen looked wise . “That’s all his young protege, Sails, ever gave out. But Sails had the only equipment in the world to pick up that space message!!’

  I sat forward at his tone. The incident had occurred five years previously. All the world had wondered how much the taciturn young scientist had failed to divulge.

  “Thomas discovered enormous teklite beds near the Venusian north pole,” Hansen told me. “He instructed Sails to build another space ship and go after it.”

  I swallowed hard. “And Sails has built one secretly?”

  Hansen just chuckled.

  “Good grief!” I gasped. Then I squinted at Hansen. “But where do you fit in? Sails would only trust the very pick of the scientific world in this.”

  “Unfortunately for Sails’, Hugo Thomas specified no scientists. He wanted an expeditionary party limited to clean-cut, typical young Americans.” He paused and looked innocently at the ceiling. “Sails had to come to me for the financing.”

  He gave the names of the men selected. There was Costigan, the Lansing Landslide at Michigan ten years back. Deval, who knew how to take other men’s inventive ideas and make them practicable.

  Akeley, whose business was filling stations, but who dabbled with archaeology. Martin, who was a bug for exploration. Winslow, who owned a small tool and machine works somewhere. Fabray, a chemical specialist in metal gasses. Sampson, a construction engineer. A cluck named Jake Reese who unaccountably made money at anything he went into. “Sails,” Hansen and myself.

  I considered my total lack of qualifications for such a trip.

  “Why pick on me to share your suicide plan?” I asked.

  Hansen grinned. “I named you,” he said.

  “Thanks for my murder!” I snapped. “Why?”

  HE TAPPED my hand with a forefinger like a railroad spike. “Because you are the only newspaper reporter I know who’ll tell the story just as it happened. Also Thomas suggested you.”

  “You wouldn’t mean there may be dirty work?” I suggested.

  Hansen’s eyes glittered. “Nobody can guess about that. What do you know of gravium?”

  I dug into my memory. “It’s fabulous stuff. So rare it can be produced only in the most minute quantities by the most delicate synthesis known to science. And at enormous expense. It belongs to the platinum family. It is heavier than blazes. Its ore would be teklite if we had teklite on Earth. Which we haven’t. So we have no gravium.”

  He nodded. “Know why we need it?”

  “Sure. It’s the only known stuff which can insulate neutrons. Gravium’s vitally needed for atomic furnaces.”

  He considered me for a long time.

  “Gravium, pal, is worth one half million dollars per ounce,” he said. “Any man who possessed a pound could run the world.”

  I began to conceive the magnitude of this cosmic jaunt!

  He bit off the tip of a cigar and put an even glow upon the end. “Now you understand the reporter part.

  I’m not looking for a chronicler with idealistic urges. I’m not risking my neck for humanity!”

  I shot him a look of sardonic humor. The fellow who prints the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin could not have put all of Hansen’s sins against humanity on the outside of a battle cruiser! He flew the Jolly Roger, but he was a good pirate in his way.

  The idea of the trip was mad. It was crazy. If Hugo Thomas couldn’t get back, what chance would we have? But if we did manage it, I’d have the biggest news scoop in history. And incidentally, enough money to buy a string of newspapers.

  “I’m dotty, but count me in,” I said. “Now let’s have a drink.”

  Then Hansen gave me another jolt—a bigger one, this time. He told me the ship was all ready and set to go, and that we’d leave in four or five hours. I was stunned.

  So we really were starting off for Venus!

  I didn’t want to think about it. I suggested another drink. In fact, I got plastered. But Hansen took care of me. Later he poured me aboard the ship and, before I got the feathers out of my brain, we were off.

  To a world familiar with Hugo Thomas’ earlier ship there was nothing unusual in this craft, except that it was larger. It was shaped like a huge sea-ray and utilized common principles of jet propulsion within the atmosphere. Out of the atmosphere it was non-controllable. It was launched by catapult and flung off gravity by powerful rockets.

  Its course was computed in advance and directed from flight inception by the time-angle of catapult and rocket performance within bands of atmosphere. If the computation was a fraction off, we had only a brief time in the atmosphere to rectify the error—or else!

  The chief scientific advancements involved were in metals, alloys, insulation of the shell, the delicate in-gravity gyro-course controls, and the internal telescoping break system to remove the terrific shock of starting out of a stationary position and gaining 25,200 miles per hour, within forty minutes. This speed was just sufficient to escape the gravitational pull of Earth and put us on a parabola. Greater speeds would have involved enormous increase of armor weight to combat the rising ratio of friction.

  Various bulkheads and insulation chambers of the shell totaled eighteen feet solid thickness. The outer skin was a foot and a half thick. It was estimated that by our return to Earth, this thickness would have been reduced to between four and seven inches by friction.

  Sails had followed Hugh Thomas’ instructions to the letter. Sails was a scientific fanatic. To him, this was the greatest event in all science history. But instead of having the world’s leading scientists along, he had what to him were a bunch of playboys. He didn’t like that.

  At first, when we took off from Earth, we were filled with excitement. But our exuberance soon simmered down to a simple state of wonder, like a child might feel in a dream.

  THERE was something awe-inspiring about limitless space. We spent a lot of time looking out at that vast blackness dotted with billions of brilliant stars. It gave us a feeling of unimportance.

  But we soon got used to that and turned to common everyday talk—endless arguments over baseball, politics and bridge. It’s not strange that Sails grew bitterly disgusted.

  But our smug conceit disappeared when we hit the cold field.

  Until then, space temperature had remained at dead zero. At no other time had it varied the slightest on our thermometers. But suddenly we passed through some invisible field which turned the air so cold it nearly froze our lungs. Dampness instantly shimmered as crystals. Hoarfrost lay across our flesh. Had the field been one second wider, it would have frozen our air-conditioning mechanism solid.

  This field came as a complete surprise. There was nothing to explain its existence, or why it was there.

  We had no warning.

  We had barely recovered our self confidence when we had a second brush with oblivion. Light blasted out of that lightless void outside. It came right through our insulated shell and knocked us flat.

  Do I make that clear? Light, which is supposed to have no body or weight, came through eighteen inches of insulated shell with such force that it knocked us down, and out, and left us shaky for days!

  That frightened us plenty. Such unknown perils unhinge common sense and reason and stir up primitive fears. Space neurosis was getting us down. Then Hansen stalked belligerently among us.

  “Maybe it was a devil,” he bellowed. “But I’d fight fifty thousand devils for the fortune we’re going to make!”

  That toughness saved us. It shamed us. It put fight back into us and boosted our morale just at a time when courage was needed most.

  CHAPTER II

  Gravium Fever

  VENUS whirled like a great green pinwheel out of the black void on our starboard bow. It grew fantastically, floating obliquely toward our plotted conjunction. There was an awesome majesty to the pale glistening planet, festooned with wisps of clouds.

  We shot suddenly into pea soup atmosphere. Circling the planet, Sails handled the craft now with admirable skill. Our rockets boomed. At last we bumped, landed, and jolted to a halt.

  Sails came to the door of the control room and looked at us with frozen contempt. I knew he was thinking of the ten greatest names in science who might have been in our places.

  “All right, gentlemen,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “You are within two hundred miles of the Venusian north pole and your wonderful fortunes!”

  Then somebody swung the thick ports open and we jumped down onto Venus.

  Impenetrable green fog strung by in slowly writhing blankets. A strange, sulphurous smell hit

our nostrils.

  There was light, but it came from the fog itself—a green phosphorescent opalescence that glared most brightly where the fog was thickest. There was thick mud underfoot.

  We lifted our voices in mighty yell. Emotions of relief and victory surged up wildly. Laughing and shouting, we tossed each other in the mire. We rubbed ooze onto our faces and into each other’s hair.

  We romped with that unpent boisterousness of huskies in the year’s first snow.

  Soon I remembered my job and slipped on actinic ray goggles to scrutinize the planet. What I saw cooled my high ardor.

  It was a land of utter desolation—a place of brooding quiet fresh from some diluvian age. Before me lay a green wet world of vast distances and swirling fog. Huge lichens clung close to the hideous green muck.

  They were the only life.

  A sudden clanking noise froze me and crisped the hair along my neck. I saw Hansen’s hilarity vanish. He tested his balance and took his bearings on the spaceship’s open port. Deval fell into a position of defense. Akeley moved back a step like a waiting cat.

  A diminutive tractor suddenly emerged from the fog. A huge man was sitting astride, riding the box like a bicycle. He resembled an Earth being, but he was green. Green from his long hair and bushy eyebrows and flesh to the fabric of his clothes.

  He drew the tractor around and stopped. Hansen stared. He put out a big muscular hand and felt the man’s shoulders.

  “Hugo Thomas!” he boomed. “You’re alive and here.”

  “Facts which I can verify,” the scientist answered.

  His words came slowly and with difficulty, for he had been many years alone. Emotion made his voice tremble.

  Sails rushed forward and embraced Thomas as one resurrected from the dead. Thomas’ eyes glistened as he returned the younger man’s bearlike hug.

  Then he turned from Sails and put a big green hand on Hansen’s shoulder. It was easy to see these two men understood and respected each other.

  Thomas explained that he had radioed from a point near Earth, but a force field had whipped him around and straight back to Venus.

  “You could have taken off for Earth again,” I said, nettled.

  He shrugged. “There was much work to do here and Earth had my message. Sooner or later somebody was bound to come along.” Sharp humor crinkled his broad face. “I rather suspected it would be you, Hansen.”

  “You were careful not to suggest my name,” Hansen growled.

  The scientist chuckled. “What need to? Gravium and you—a fortune and a big risk —the toughest mining job in history—It was as natural as the swing of a needle toward a magnet.”

  Hansen rubbed his hands. “Then the gravium is here? There is teklite?” A glow smoldered in his eyes.

  Thomas gestured toward a low ridge. “Right on the surface.”

  Hansen didn’t hesitate. Unable to contain himself, he started for the ridge. His feelings were contagious. I have seen gold rushes and stake races for diamond claims, but I’ve never seen men go berserk as we did.

  FIFTY yards from the ship, men began to stagger and drop. We hadn’t adjusted ourselves to the low gravity or atmosphere. Our lightest motions threw us off balance and left us spent. Heaven knows what our blood pressure must have been in our crazed excitement.

  When I got to the ridge, Hansen and Akeley were digging furiously. Costigan came up gasping. Then Deval and Fabray, and Martin reeled forward and fell. Nobody paid the slightest attention. Every man was too frantic, digging his bare hands into that miasmic muck.

  I think Hansen’s fever was wildest, and yet he was coolest of the lot. He stopped suddenly, staring into the fog. Seizing the filter scanner, he walked away. When he returned, there was a hard setness to his face.

  “I can’t make out the ship,” he said in a worried voice.

  Weird ideas pass through the mind in a new world. Maybe the ship had disintegrated. Maybe it wasn’t there. Maybe somebody had flown it away. It was like being marooned on a strange atoll, without any way of getting off.”

  I took the scanner and climbed the low ridge. Nothing but green glare met my gaze. I turned back, filled with terror. Now there was no sign of the men. I yelled. The fog swallowed my voice. Really swallowed it, as thoroughly as sound absorbers in laboratories. Panic-stricken, I bolted down the ridge and bumped into Akeley without seeing him! Yet there was still the same intensity of light.

  Hansen showed his mettle at that moment.

  “Well, we can’t stay here,” he snapped. “Our oxygen’s running out. Back to the ship. Come on!”

  “But what if we get lost,” Reese whimpered.

  “Then crawl!” Hansen barked.

  He was brutal, but his voice gave us fresh confidence. There was plenty of fighting spirit in Hansen.

  He moved ahead, a gigantic shadow in the green fog. I kept at his heels, yet the suck of his footsteps sounded as a bare whisper. I grew desperately tired—the weariness of utter exhaustion. I fell, got up, and fell again. The twentieth time I quit fighting the fog and oozing muck. I slept right there.

  I awakened with an instant sense of desertion. The light had not changed, but that meant nothing. I shouted. Slowly, the terrible fact seeped into me. The fog was now completely sound absorbent. Not a sound came back.

  An unreasoning anger boiled up through me—a fury that I had come all this way through space to get lost within a few yards of my ship. I clambered to my feet and plunged ahead. My heart pumped madly, but I kept on until something hard hit me on the forehead and blocked my passage.

  I could see nothing, but I felt the ship’s hull, and recognized it, immediately in front of me. I groped for the hatch and dragged myself in. I have felt strong emotions in my life, but never such utter relief as coming through that port.

  I did not recover from my oxygen exhaustion until several hours later. Perhaps my condition was complicated by the dampness of the atmosphere. I came into semi-consciousness, and grew vaguely aware of Sails talking passionately.

  “Earth has got to have gravium dirt cheap, Professor!” he was shouting. “Science needs it as a man needs water.”

  Thomas sounded faintly amused. “Well, how would fifty dollars an ounce be for a starting price?

  Eventually we may get it down to the price of steel or iron.”

  I felt a vague disturbance at this thought, but I drifted back into coma. When I finally awakened, Hansen, Akeley and Deval were sitting at the ward table talking. Deval poured me a cup of coffee and brandy.

  Sails had gone.

  I had forgotten about local gravity and I nearly knocked out my teeth with the coffee cup, but the strong, hot drink cleared my head and gave me fresh strength.

  “You heard it, Akeley, and so did you, Deval!” Hansen said in hard tones. “Gravium, the professor said.

  Not teklite. But the pure stuff! At fifty dollars an ounce!” He broke off and glared with rage. “That would mean about ten thousand dollars each for risking our bloody necks to get to this green hell and back through space!”

  DEVAL turned to glance at us. “Sails would give his share to science,” he growled. “That would kill the market for the time. We’d have something worth a fortune we couldn’t sell!”

  “Sails acts mighty strange to me at times,” Hansen said in a rasping voice. “A few months in a sanitarium might do him good. But we couldn’t put a man like Thomas away easily. If he gets back to Earth, he’ll be a tin god.”

  “If he gets back?” Akeley demanded sharply.

  Hansen met his look with one fully as black. Then he lighted a cigarette. Hansen was a shrewd customer.

  He never said too much at one time. He let his ideas take root.

  We ate heavily and had just finished when Sails and Thomas came in. The scientist beamed. It was hard to think of doing anything to such a man.

  After a glance at each of us, he nodded with satisfaction. “Good! You boys are all well again. You were lucky to get back. Hereafter, don’t forget to watch the light changes on Venus.”

  “How can we know?” Hansen asked.

  “Well, it’s difficult,” Thomas admitted. “The light intensity never varies. But the angles of the rays do. They have peculiar properties in the fog. Filters are only serviceable five out of fourteen hours.”

 

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