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VOLUME XVI NUMBER 2
OCTOBER 1935
A STREET & SMITH PUBLICATION
The entire contents of this magazine are protected by copyright, and must not be reprinted without the publishers’ permission,
Table of Contents
Feature Serial Novel:
I AM NOT GOD (Part I) . . Nat Schachner . 64 Interpreting an age-old problem through the medium of gases which
encompass the earth from outer space. Novelettes: NIGHT Don A. Stuart. 8
The long-awaited sequel to “Twilight” —pushing ahead into the eterna! night when mankind sleeps THE PLANET OF DOUBT. ‘ . Stanley G. Weinbaum . 106 A new story of the strange planet in which science is almost-——but not quite—left without its desired data. THE WAY OF THE EARTH a . David R. Daniels . +, lon He was a rebel—uwith everything to gain and nothing to lose—so he laughed and ventured into the unknown.
Short Stories: DERELICT F P . Raymond Z. Gallun . 23
All discovery is not confined to “the planets. Here is a gripping reminder of tragedy in the spaceways.
INTRA-PLANETARY . ‘ . Chan Corbett o< oe
A novel presentation of the planetary conception—with a thought behind it for ali of us.
A PRINCESS OF PALLIS . Clifton B. Kruse . . Stowaways aboard—and a freighter trailing. It meant trouble FACETED EYES . ° . Eh. Rese . 127
Biological caperimentation leads to sports which, because of adaptive powers, are deadly.
PHANTOM STAR ‘ . J. Harvey Haggard . 132
A story of vengeance aboard a sky liner whercin a ship plunges into
a star. Serial Novel: ISLANDS OF THE SUN (Conclusion) . Jack Williamson . 33 Concluding a new pints te. the origin of our galary—and of li
Readers’ Department: BRASS TACKS (The Open House of Controversy) . e - 154 EDITOR’S PAGE . ; ° . « aoe Cover Painting ‘ly Howard v. Brown
Story illustrations by Elliott Dold, Jr., M. Marchioni,; and C. R. Thomson :
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ONDON was staring through the > glasses with a face tense and
drawn, all his attention utterly concentrated on that one almost in- visible speck infinitely far up in the blue sky, and saying over and over again in the most horribly absent-minded way,
“My Lord—my Lord
ae " Stuart
shivered down at me, sheer agony in his face.
Suddenly he and looked
“He’s never coming down. Don, he’s never coming down s
I knew it, too—knew it as solidly as I knew the knewledge was impossible. But I smiled and said: “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. If anything, I’d fear his com-
ing down. What goes up comes down.”
Major Condon trembled all over. His mouth worked horribly for a moment before he could speak. “Talbot—I’m scared—lI’m horribly scared. You know —you’re his assistant—you know he’s trying to defeat gravity. Men aren’t meant to—it’s wrong—wrong His eyes were glued on those binocu-
The machines were far beyond anything ever conceived—machines of perfection.
lars again, with the same terrible tensity, and now he was saying over and over in that absent-minded way, “wrong— wrong—wrong 4
Simultaneously he stiffened, and stopped. The dozen or so other men standing on that lonely little emergency field stiffened ; then the major crumpled to the ground. I’ve never before seen
10 ASTOUNDING STORIES
a man faint, let alone an army officer with a D. S. medal. I didn’t stop to help him, because I knew something had happened. [| grabbed the glasses.
Far, far up in the sky was that little orange speck—far, where there is almost no air, and he had been forced to wear a stratosphere suit with a little alcohol heater. The broad, orange wings were overlaid now with a faint-glowing, pearl- gray light. And it was falling. Slowly, at first, circling aimlessly downward. Then it dipped, rose, and somehow went into a tail spin.
It was horrible. I know I must have breathed, but it didn’t seem so. It took minutes for it to fall those miles, despite the speed. Eventually it whipped out of that tail spin—through sheer speed, whipped out and into a power dive. It was a ghastly, flying coffin, hurtling at more than half a thousand miles an hour when it reached the Earth, some fifteen miles away.
The ground trembled, and the air shook with the crash of it. We were in the cars and roaring across the ground long before it hit. I was in Bob’s car, with Jeff, his laboratory technician— Bob’s little roadster he’d never need again. The engine picked up quickly, and we were going seventy before we left the field, jumped a shallow ditch and hit the road—the deserted, concrete road that led off toward where he must be. The engine roared as Jeff clamped down on the accelerator. Dimly, I heard the major’s big car coming along behind us.
Jeff drove like a maniac, but I didn’t notice. I knew the thing had done ninety-five but I think we must have done more. The wind whipped tears in my eyes so I couldn’t be sure whether I saw mounting smoke and flame or not. With Diesel fuel there shouldn’t be— but that plane had been doing things it shouldn’t. It had been trying out Carter’s antigravity coil.
We shot up the flat, straight road across wide, level country, the wind
moaning a requiem about the car. Far ahead I saw the side road that must lead off toward where Bob should be, and lurched to the braking of the car, the whine and sing of violently shrieking tires, then to the skidding corner. It was a sand road; we slithered down it and for all the lightness and power, we slowed to sixty-five, clinging to the seat as the soft sand gripped and clung. Violently Jeff twisted into a branch- ing cow path, and somehow the springs took it. We braked to a stop a quarter
of a mile from the plane.
IT WAS in a fenced field of pasture and wood lot. We leaped the fence, and raced toward it; Jeff got there first, just as the major’s car shrieked to a stop behind ours.
The major was cold and pale when he reached us. “Dead,” he stated.
And I was very much colder and prob- ably several times as pale.~ “I don’t know!” I moaned. “He isn’t there!”
“Not there!” The major almost screamed it. “He must be—he has to be. He had no parachute—wouldn’t take one. They say he didn’t jump——”
I pointed to the plane, and wiped a little cold sweat from my forehead. I felt clammy all over, and my spine prickled. The solid steel of the huge Diesel engine was driven through the stump of a tree, down into the ground perhaps eight or nine feet, and the dirt and rock had splashed under that blow like wet mud.
The wings were on the other side of the field, flattened, twisted straws of dural alloy. The fuselage of the ship was a perfect silhouette—a longitudinal projection that had flattened in on itself, each separate section stopping only as it hit the ground.
The great torus coil with its strangely twined wrappings of hair-fine bismuth wire was intact! And bent over it, twisted, utterly wrecked by the impact, was the main-wing stringer—the great
NIGHT ii
dural-alloy beam that. supported most of the ship’s weight in the air. It was battered, crushed on those hair-fine, fragile bismuth wires—and not one of them was twisted or displaced or so much as skinned. The back frame of the ponderous Diesel engine—the heavy supercharger was the anvil of that com- bination—was cracked and splintered. And not one wire of the hellish bismuth coil was strained or skinned or displaced.
And the red pulp that should have been there—the red pulp that had been a man—wasn’t. It simply wasn’t there at all. He hadn’t left the plane. In the clear, cloudless air, we could see that. He was gone.
We examined it, of course. A farmer came, and another, and looked, and talked. Then several farmers came in old, dilapidated cars with their wives and families, and watched.
We set the owner of the property on watch and went away—went back to the city for workmen and a truck with a derrick. Dusk was falling. It would be morning before we could do anything, so we went away.
Five of us—the major of the army air force, Jeff Rodney, the two Douglass Co. men whose names I never remem- bered and I—sat in my—our—room.
Bob's and Jeff’s and mine. We'd been sitting there for hours trying to talk, trying tc think, trying to remember every little detail, and trying to forget every ghastly detail. We couldn’t re- member the detail that explained it, nor forget the details that rode and harried us.
And the telephone rang. I started. Then slowly got up and answered. A strange voice, flat and rather unpleasant, said: “Mr. Talbot?”
“Yes.”
It was Sam Gantry, the farmer we’d left on watch. “There’s a man here.”
“Yes? What does he want?”
“T dunno. I dunno where he came from. He's either dead or out cold. Gotta funny kind of an aviator suit on, with a glass face on it. He looks all blue, so I guess he’s dead.”
“Lord! Bob! Did you take that helmet off?” I roared.
“No, sir, no—no, sir. him the way he was.”
“His tanks have run out. Listen. Take a hammer, a wrench, anything, and break that glass faceplate! Quick! We'll be there.”
Jeff was moving. The major was, too, and the others. I made a grab for the half-empty bottle of Scotch, started out, and ducked back into the closet. With the oxygen bottle under my arm I jumped into the crowded little road- ster just as Jeff started it moving. He turned on the horn, and left it that way.
We dodged, twisted, jumped and stopped with jerks in traffic, then leaped into smooth, roaring speed out toward the farmer’s field. The turns were familiar now; we scarcely slowed for them, sluing around them. This time Jeff charged through the wire fence. A headlight popped; there was a shrill scream of wire, the wicked zing of wire scratching across the hood and mud guards, and we were bouncing across the field.
We just left
THERE WERE two lanterns on the ground ; three men carried others ; more men squatted down beside a still figure garbed in a fantastic, bulging, airproof stratosphere suit. They looked at us, open-mouthed as we skidded to a halt, moving aside as the major leaped out and dashed over with the Scotch. I followed close behind with the oxygen bottle.
Bob’s faceplate was shattered, his face blue, his lips blue and flecked with froth. A long gash across his cheek from the shattered glass bled slowly. The major lifted his head without a word, and
12 ASTOUNDING STORIES
glass tinkled inside the helmet as he tried to force a little whisky down his throat.
“Wait!” I called. “Major, give him artificial respiration, and this will bring him arcund quicker—better.” The major nodded, and rose, rubbing his arm with a peculiar expression.
“That’s cold!” he said, as he flipped Bob over, and straddled his back. I held the oxygen bottle under Bob’s nose as the major swung back in his arc, and let the raw, cold oxygen gas flow into his nostrils.
In ten seconds Bob coughed, gurgled, coughed violently, and took a deep shuddering breath. His face turned pink almost instantly under that lungful of oxygen, and I noticed with some sur- prise that he seemed to exhale almost nothing, his body absorbing the oxygen rapidly.
He coughed again; then: “I could breathe a heck of a sight better if you'd get off my back,” he said. The major
jumped up, and Bob turned over and
sat up. He waved me aside, and spat. “I’m—all right,” he said softly.
“Lord, man, what happened?” de- manded the major.
30b sat silent for a minute. His eyes had the strangest look—a hungry look— as he gazed about him. He looked at the trees beyond and at the silent, watching men in the light of the lan- terns; then up, up to where a myriad stars gleamed and danced and flickered in the clear night sky.
“T’m back,” he said softly. Then sud- denly he shivered, and looked horribly afraid. ‘“But—I’ll have to be—then— too.”
He looked at the major for a minute, and smiled faintly. And at the two Douglass Co. men. “Your plane was all right. I started up on the wings, as arranged, went way up, till I thought surely I was at a safe height, where the air wasn’t too dense and the field surely wouldn’t reach to Earth—Lord !—reach
to Earth! I didn’t guess how far that field extended. It touched Earth— twice.
“T was at forty-five thousand when I decided it was safe, and cut the engine. It died, and the stillness shocked me. It was so quiet. So quiet.
“T turned on the coil circuit, and the dynamotor began to hum as the tubes warmed up. And then—the field hit me. It paralyzed me in an instant. I never had a chance to break the circuit, though I knew instantly something was wrong—terribly wrong. But the very first thing it did was to paralyze me, and I had to sit there and watch the instru- ments climb to positions and meanings they were never meant for.
“T realized I alone was being affected by that coil—I alone, sitting directly over it. I stared at the meters and they began to fade, began to seem trans- parent, unreal. And as they faded into blankness I saw clear sky beyond them; then for a hundredth of a second, like some effect of persistence of vision, | thought I saw the plane falling. twisting down at incredible speed, and the light faded as the Sun seemed to rocket sud- denly across the sky and vanish.
“T don’t know how long I was in that paralyzed condition, where there was only blankness—neither dark nor light, nor time nor any form—but I breathed many times. Finally, form crawled and writhed into the blankness, and seemed to solidify beneath me as, abruptly, the blankness gave way to a dull red light. I was falling.
“T thought instantly of the forty-five thousand feet that lay between me and the solid Earth, and stiffened automati- cally in terror. And in the same instant I landed in a deep blanket of white snow, stained by the red light that lighted the world.
“COLD. Cold—it tore into me like the fang of a savage animal. What
NIGHT 13
cold! The cold of ultimate death. It ripped through that thick, insulated suit and slashed at me viciously, as though there were no insulation there. I shiv- ered so violently I could scarcely turn up the alcohol valves. You know I car- ried alcohol tanks and catalyst grids for heating, because the only electric fields I wanted were those of the apparatus. Even used a Diesel instead of gas engine.
“I thank the Lord for that then. I realized that whatever had happened I was in a spot indescribably cold and desolate. And in the same instant, rea- lized that the sky was black. Blacker than the blackest night, and yet before me the snow field stretched to infinity, tainted by the blood-red light, and my shadow crawled in darker red at my feet.
“I turned around. As far as the eye could see in three directions the land swept off in very low, very slightly roll- ing hills, almost plains—red plains of snow dyed with the dripping light of sunset. I thought.
“In the fourth direction, a wall—a wall that put the Great Wall of China to shame—loomed up half a mile—a blood-red wall that had the luster of metal. It stretched across the horizon, and looked a scant hundred yards away, for the air was utterly clear. I turned up my alcohol burners a bit more and felt a little better.
“Something jerked my head around like a giant hand—a sudden thought. I stared at the Sun and gulped. It was four times—six times—the size of the Sun I knew. And it wasn’t setting. It was forty-five degrees from the horizon. It was red. Blood-red. And there wasn’t the slightest bit of radiant heat reaching my face from it. That Sun was cold.
“T’d just automatically assumed I was still on Earth, whatever else might have happened, but now I knew I couldn’t be. It must be another planet of another sun
—a frozen planet—for that snow was frozen air. I knew it absolutely. A frozen planet of a dead sun.
“And then I changed even that. I looked up at the black sky above me, and in all the vast black bow! of the heavens, not three-score stars were visible. Dim, red stars, with one single sun that stood out for its brilliance—a yellowish-red sun perhaps a tenth as bright as our Sun, but a monster here. It was another —a dead—space. For if that snow was frozen air, the only atmosphere must have been neon and helium. There wasn't any hazy air to stop the light of the stars, and that dim, red sun didn’t obscure them with its light. The stars were gone.
“In that glimpse, my mind began working by itself; I was scared.
“Scared? I was so scared I was afraid I was going to be sick. Because right then I knew I was never coming back. When I felt that cold, I’d won- dered when my oxygen bottles would give out, if I’d get back before they did. Now it was not a worry. It was simply the limiting factor on an already- determined thing, the setting on the time bomb. had just so much more time before I died right there.
“My mind was working out things, working them out all by itself, and giv- ing answers I didn’t want, didn’t want to know about. For some reason it per- sisted in considering this was Earth, and the conviction became more and more fixed. It was right. That was Earth. And it was old Sol. Old—old Sol. It was the time axis that coil distorted— not gravity at all. My mind worked that out with a logic as cold as that planet.
“If it was time it had distorted, and this was Earth, then it had distorted time beyond imagining to an extent as meaningless to our minds as the distance a hundred million light years is. It was simply vast—incalculable. The Sun was dead. The Earth was dead. And
14 ASTOUNDING STORIES
Earth was already, in our time, two bil- lions of years old, and in all that geo- logical time, the Sun had not changed measurably. Then how long was it since my time? The Sun was dead. The very stars were dead. It must have been, I thought even then, billions on billions of years. And I grossly under- estimated it.
“The world was old—old—old. The very rocks and ground radiated a crush- ing aura of incredible age. It was old, older than—but what is there? Older than the hills? Hills? Gosh, they'd been born and died and been born and worn away again, a million, a score of million times! Old as the stars? No, that wouldn’t do. The stars were dead —then.
“T looked again at the metal wall, and set out for it, and the aura of age washed up at me, and dragged at me, and tried to stop this motion when all motion should have ceased. And the thin, un- utterably cold wind whined in dead pro-
est at me, and pulled at me with the ghost hands of the million million mil- lion that had been born and lived and died in the countless ages before I was born.
“T wondered as I went. I didn’t think clearly ; for the dead aura of the dead planet pulled at me. Age. The stars were dying, dead. They were huddled there in space, like decrepit old men, huddling for warmth. The galaxy was shrunk. So tiny, it wasn’t a thousand light years across, the stars were sepa- rated by miles where there had been light years. The magnificent, proudly sprawling universe I had known, that flung itself across a million million light years, that flung radiant energy through space by the millions of millions of tons was—gone.
“Tt was dying—a dying miser that hoarded its last broken dregs of energy in a tiny cramped space. It was broken and shattered. A thousand billion years
before the cosmical constant had been dropped from that broken universe. The cosmical constant that flung giant gal- axies whirling apart with ever greater speed had no place here. It had hurled the universe in broken fragments, till each spattered bit felt the chill of lone- liness, and wrapped space about itself, to become a universe in itself while the flaming galaxies vanished.
“THAT had happened so long ago that the writing it had left in the fabric of space itself had worn away. Only the gravity constant remained, the hoarding constant, that drew things to- gether, and slowly the galaxy collapsed, shrunken and old, a withered mummy.
“The very atoms were dead. The light was cold; even the red light made things look older, colder. There was no youth in the universe. I didn’t belong, and the faint protesting rustle of the infinitely cold wind about me moved the snow in muted, futile protest, resenting my intrusion from a time when things were young. It whinnied at me feebly, and chilied the youth of me.
“T plodded on and on, and always the metal wall retreated, like one of those desert mirages. I was too stupefied by the age of the thing to wonder; I just walked on.
“T was getting nearer, though. The wall was real; it was fixed. As I drew slowly nearer, the polished sheen of the wall died and the last dregs of hope died. I’d thought there might be some one still living behind that wall. Beings who could build such a thing might be able to live even here. But I couldn't stop then; I just went on. The wall was broken and cracked. It wasn’t a wall I'd seen; it was a series of broken walls, knitted by distance to a smooth front.
“There was no weather to age them, only the faintest stirring of faint, dead winds—winds of neon and helium, inert and uncorroding—as dead and inert as
NIGHT 15
the universe. The city had been dead a score of billions of years. That city was dead for a time ten times longer than the age of our planet to-day. But nothing destroyed it. Earth was dead —too dead to suffer the racking pains of life. The air was dead, too dead to scrape away metal.
“But the universe itself was dead. There was no cosmic radiation then to finally level the walls by atomic disinte- gration. There had been a wall—a single metal wall. Something—perhaps a last wandering meteor—had chanced on it in a time incalculably remote, and broken it. I entered through the great gap. Snow covered the city—soft, white snow. The great red sun stool still just where it was. Earth’s restless rota- tion had long since been stilled—long, long since.
“There were dead gardens above, and I wandered up to them. That was really what convinced me it was a human city,on Earth. There were frozen, hud- dled heaps that might once have been men. Little fellows with fear forever frozen on their faces huddled helplessly over something that must once have been a heating device. Dead perhaps, since the last storm old Earth had known, tens of billions of years before.
“I went down. There were vastnesses in that city. It was huge. It stretched forever, it seemed, on and on, in its deadness. Machines, machines every- where. And the machines were dead, too. I went down, down where I thought a bit of light and heat might linger. I didn’t know then how long death had been there; those corpses
looked so fresh, preserved by the eternal cold.
“It grew dark down below, and only through rents and breaks did that bloody
light seep in. Down and down, till I was below the level of the dead surface. The white snow persisted, and then I came to the cause of that final, sudden
death. I could understand then. More and more I had puzzled, for those machines I’d seen I knew were far and beyond anything we ever conceived— machines of perfection, self-repairing, and self-energizing, self-perpetuating. They could make duplicates of them- selves, and duplicate other, needed machines; they were intended to be eternal, everlasting.
“But the designers couldn’t cope with some things that were beyond even their majestic imaginations—the imaginations that conceived these cities that had lived beyond—a million times beyond—what they had dreamed. They must have conceived some vague future. But not a future when the Earth died, and the Sun died, and even the universe itself died.
“Cold had killed them. They had heating arrangements, devices intended to maintain forever the normal tem- perature despite the wildest variations of the weather. But in every electrical machine, resistances, balance resistances, and induction coils, balance condensers, and other inductances. And cold, stark, spatial cold, through ages, threw them off. Despite the heaters, cold crept in colder—cold that made their resistance balances and their induction coils super- conductors! That destroyed the city. Superconduction—like the elimination of friction, on which all things must rest. It is a drag and a thing engineers fight forever. Resistance and friction must finally be the rest and the base of all things, the force that holds the great bed bolts firm and the brakes that stop the machines when needed.
“Electrical resistance died in the cold and the wonderful machines stopped for the replacement of defective parts. And when they were replaced, they, too, were defective. For what months must that constant stop—replacement—start—stop —replacement have gone on before, at last defeated forever, those vast ma- chines must bow in surrender to the in-
16 ASTOUNDING STORIES
evitable? Cold had defeated them by defeating and removing the greatest obstacle of the engineers that built them —resistance.
“They must have struggled forever —as we would say—through a hundred billion years against encroaching harsh- ness of nature, forever replacing worn, defective parts. At last, defeated for- ever, the great power plants, fed by dying atoms, had been forced into eternal idleness and cold. Cold con- quered them at last.
“They didn’t blow up. Nowhere did I see a wrecked machine; always they had stopped automatically when the de- fective resistances made it impossible to continue. The stored energy that was meant to re-start those machines after repairs had been made had long since leaked out. Never again could they move, I knew.
“T WONDERED how long they had been, how long they had gone on and
on, long after the human need of them
had vanished. For that vast city con- tained only a very few humans at the end. What untold ages of lonely func- tioning perfection had stretched behind those at-last-defeated mechanisms?
“T wandered out, to see perhaps more, before the necessary end came to me, too. Through the city of death. Every- where little self-contained machines, cleaning machines that had kept that perfect city orderly and neat stood help- less and crushed by eternity and cold. They must have continued functioning for years after the great central power stations failed, for each contained its own store of energy, needing only occa- sional recharge from the central sta- tions.
“T could see where breaks had oc- curred in the city, and, clustered about those breaks were motionless repair ma- chines, their mechanisms in positions of work, the débris cleared away and care-
fully stacked on motionless trucks. The new beams and plates were partly at- tached, partly fixed and left, as the last dregs of their energy was fruitlessly expended in the last, dying attempts of that great body to repair itself. The death wounds lay unmended.
“T started back up. Up to the top of the city. It was a long climb, an infinite, weary climb, up half a mile of winding ramps, past deserted, dead homes; past, here and there, shops and restaurants; past motionless little au- tomative passenger cars.
“Up and up, to the crowning gardens that lay stiff and brittle and frozen. The breaking of the roof must have caused a sudden chill, for their leaves lay green in sheaths of white, frozen air. Brittle glass, green and perfect to the touch. Flowers, blooming in wonderful per- fection showed still; they didn’t seem dead, but it didn’t seem they could be otherwise under the blanket of cold.
“Did you ever sit up with a corpse?” Bob looked up at us—through us. “I had to once, in my little home town where they always did that. I sat with a few neighbors while the man died be- fore my eyes. I knew he must die when I came there. He.died—and I sat there all night while the neighbors filed out, one by one, and the quiet settled. The quiet of the dead.
“T had to again. I was sitting with a corpse then. The corpse of a dead world in a dead universe, and the quiet didn’t have to settle there; it had settled a billion years ago, and only my coming had stirred those feeble, protesting ghosts of eon-dead hopes of that planet to softly whining protest—protest the wind tried to sob to me, the dead wind of the dead gases. I'll never be able to call them inert gases again. I know. I know they are dead gases, the. dead gases of dead worlds.
“And above, through the cracked crystal of the rook, the dying suns
AST—1
eS Se i le ee od
NIGHT 17
looked down on the dead city. I couldn’t stay there. I went down. Down under layer after layer of buildings, buildings of gleaming metal that reflected the dim, blood light of the Sun outside in car- mine stains. I went down and down, down to the machines again. But even there hopelessness seemed more intense. Again I saw that agonizing struggle of the eternally faithful machines trying to repair themselves once more to serve the masters who were dead a million million years. I could see it again in the frozen, exhausted postures of the repair machines, stilled forever in their hopeless endeavors, the last poor dregs of energy spilled in fruitless conflict with time.
“It mattered little. Time himself was dying now, dying with the city and the planet and the universe he had killed.
“But those machines had tried so hard to serve again—and failed. Now they could never try again. Even they—the deathless machines—were dead.
“I went out again, away from those machines, out into the illimitable corri- dors, on the edge of the city. I could not penetrate far before the darkness became as absolute as the cold. I passed the shops where goods, un- touched by time in this cold, still beck- oned those strange humans, but humans for all that ; beckoned the masters of the machines that were no more. I vaguely entered one to see what manner of things they used in that time.
“I nearly screamed at the motion of the thing in there, heard dimly through my suit the strangely softened sounds it made in the thin air. I watched it stag- ger twice—and topple. I cannot guess what manner of storage cells they had —save that they were marvelous beyond imagination. That stored energy that somehow I had released by entering was some last dreg that had remained through a time as old as our planet now. Its voice was stilled forever. But it drove me out—on.
AST—2
“It had died while I watched. But somehow it made me more curious. I wondered again, less oppressed by utter death. Still, some untapped energy re- mained in this place, stored unimagin- ably. I looked more keenly, watched more closely. And when I saw a screen in one office, I wondered. It was a screen. I could see readily it was tele- vision of some type. Exploratively, I touched a stud. Sound! A humming, soft sound!
“To my mind leaped a picture of a system of these. There must be—inter- connected—a vast central office some- where with vaster accumulator cells, so huge, so tremendous in their power once, that even the little microfraction that remained was great. A storage system untouchable to the repair machines— the helpless, hopeless power machines.
“IN AN INSTANT I was alive again with hope. There was a strange series of studs and dials, unknown de- vices. I pulled back on the stud I had pressed, and stood trembling, wonder- ing. Was there hope?
“Then the thought died. What hope? The city was dead. Not merely that. It had been dead, dead for untold time. Then the whole planet was dead. With whom might I connect? There were none on the whole planet, so what mat- tered it that there was a communication system.
“T looked at the thing more blankly. Had there been—how could I interpret its multitudinous devices? There was a thing on one side that made me think of a telephone dial for some reason. A pointer over a metal sheet engraved with nine symbols in a circle under the arrow of the pointer. Now the pointer was over what was either the first or the last of these.
“Clumsily, in these gloves, I fingered one of the little symbol buttons inlaid in the metal. There was an unexpected
click, a light glowed on the screen, a lighted image! It was a simple pro- jection—but what a projection! A three-dimensional sphere floated, turning slowly before my eyes, turning majesti- cally. And I nearly fell as understand- ing flooded me abruptly. The pointer was a selector! The studs beneath the pointer I understood! Nine of them. One after the other I pressed, and nine spheres—each different—swam before me.
“And right there I stopped and did some kard thinking. Nine spheres. Nine planets. Earth was shown first— a strange planet to me, but one I knew from the relative size and. the position of the pointer must be Earth—then, in order, the other eight.
“Now—might there be life? Yes. In those nine worlds there might be, somewhere.
“Where? Mercury—nearest the Sun? No, the Sun was too dead, too cold, even for warmth there. And Mercury was too small. I knew, even as I thought, that I’d have one good chance because whatever means they had for communi- cation wouldn’t work without tremen- dous power. If those incredible storage cells had the power for even one shot, they had no more. Somehow I guessed that this apparatus might incorporate no resistance whatever. Here would be only very high frequency alternating current, and only condensers and in- ductances would be used in it. Super- cooling didn’t bother them any. It im- proved them. Not like the immense direct-current power machinery.
“But where to try? Jupiter? That was big. And then I saw what the solu- tion must be. Cold had ruined these machines, thrown them off by making them too-perfect conductors. Because they weren’t designed to defend them- selves against spatial cold. But the machines—if there were any—on Pluto for instance, must originally have been
18 ASTOUNDING STORIES
designed for just such conditions? There it had always been cold. There it always would be cold.
“T looked at that thing with an in- tensity that should have driven my bare eyesight to Pluto. It was a hope. My only hope. But—how to‘signal Pluto? They could not understand! If there were any ‘they.’
“So I had to guess—and hope. Some- how, I knew, there must be some means of calling the intelligent attendant, that the user might get aid. There was a bank of little studs—twelve of them— with twelve symbols, each different, in the center of the panel, grouped in four rows of three. I guessed. Duodecimal system.
“Talk. of the problems of inter- planetary communication! Was there ever such a one? The problem of an anachronism in the city of the dead on a dead planet, seeking life somewhere, somehow.
“There were two studs, off by them- selves, separate from the twelve—one green, one red. Again I guessed. Each of these had a compiex series of symbols on it, so I turned the pointer on the right to Pluto, wavered, and turned it to Neptune. Piuto was farther. Neptune had been cold enough; the machines would still be working there, and it would be, perhaps, less of a strain on the dregs of energy that might remain.
“T depressed the green symbol hoping I had guessed truly, that red still meant danger, trouble and wrongness to men when that was built—that it meant re- lease and cancellation for a wrongly pressed key. That left green to be an operative call signal.
“Nothing happened. The green key alone was not enough. I looked again, pressed the green key and that stud I had first pressed.
“The thing hummed again. But it was a deeper note now, an entirely dif- ferent sound, and there was a frenzied
clicking inside. Then the green stud kicked back at me. The Neptune key under the pointer glowed softly; the screen began to shimmer with a grayish light. And, abruptly, the humming groaned as though at a terrific overload ; the screen turned dull; the little signal light under Neptune’s key grew dim. The signal was being sent—hurled out.
“Minute after minute I stood there, staring. . The screen grew very slowly, very gently duller, duller. The energy was fading. The last stored driblet was being hurled away—away into space. ‘Oh,’ I groaned, ‘it’s hopeless—hopeless “to—’
“I’d realized the thing would take hours to get to that distant planet, traveling at the speed of light, even if it had been correctly aligned. But the machinery that should have done that through the years probably had long since failed for lack of power.
“But I stood there till the groaning motors ceased altogether, and the screen was as dark as I’d found it, the signal light black. I released the stud then, and backed away, dazed by the utter collapse of an insane hope. Experi- mentally I pressed the Neptune symbol again. So little power was left now, that only the faintest wash of murky light projected the Neptune image, little energy as that would have consumed.
“I went out. Bitter. Hopeless. Earth’s last picture was long, long since painted—and mine had been the hand that spent Earth’s last poor resource. To its utter exhaustion, the eternal city had strived to serve the race that created it, and I, from the dawn of time had, at the end of time, drained its last poor atom of life. The thing was a thing done.
“SLOWLY I went back to the roof and the dying suns. Up the miles of winding ramp that climbed a half mile straight up. I went slowly—only life
knows haste—and I was of the dead.
NIGHT
19
“IT found a bench up there—a carved bench of metal in the midst of a riot of colorful, frozen flowers. I sat down, and looked out across the frozen city to the frozen world beyond, and the freezing red Sun.
“T do not know how long I sat there. And then something whispered in my mind.
““We sought you at the television machine.’
“T leaped from the bench and stared wildly about me.
“It was floating in the air—a shining dirigible of metal, ruby-red in that light, twenty feet long, perhaps ten in diameter, bright, warm orange light gleaming from its ports. I stared at it in amazement.
““TIt—it worked!’ I gasped.
“The beam carried barely enough energy to energize the amplifiers when it reached Neptune, however,’ replied the creature in the machine.
“TI couldn’t see him—I knew I wasn’t hearing him, but somehow that didn’t surprise me.
“*Your oxygen has almost entirely given out, and I believe your mind is suffering from lack of oxygen. I would suggest you enter the lock; there is air in here.’
“T don’t know how he knew, but the gauges confirmed his statement. The oxygen was pretty nearly gone. I had perhaps another hour’s supply if I opened the valves wide—but it was a most uncomfortably near thing, even so.
“T got in. I was beaming, joyous. There was life. This universe was not so dead as I had supposed. Not on Earth, perhaps, but only because they did not choose! They had space ships! Eagerly I climbed in, a strange thrill running through my body as I crossed the threshold of the lock. The door closed behind me with a soft shush on its soft gaskets, locked, and a pump whined somewhere for a moment; then the inner door opened. I stepped in—
20 ASTOUNDING STORIES
and instantly turned .off my alcohol burners. There was heat—heat and light and air!
“In a moment I had the outer lacings loose, and the inner zipper down. Thirty seconds later I stepped out of the suit, and took a deep breath. The air was clean and sweet and warm, invigorating, fresh-smelling, as though it had blown over miles of green, Sun-warmed fields. It smelled alive, and young.
“THEN I looked for the man who had come for me. There was none. In the nose of the ship, by the controls, floated a four-foot globe of metal, softly glowing with a warm, golden light. The light pulsed slowly or swiftly with the rhythm of his thoughts, and I knew that this was the one who had spoken to me.
“*You had expected a human?’ he thought to me. ‘There are no more. There have been none for a time I can- not express in your mind. Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expres- sion, but no understanding of that time, so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from the original G-O stage— a very, very long time ago.’
“T looked at him and wondered. Where was he from? Who—what— what manner of thing? Was it an armor-incased living creature or another of the perfect machines?
“T felt him watching my mind operate, pulsing softly in his golden light. And suddenly I thought to look out of the ports. The dim red suns were wheel- ing across those ports at an unbelievable rate. Earth was long since gone. As I looked, a dim, incredibly dim, red disk suddenly appeared, expanded—and I looked in awe at Neptune.
“The planet was scarcely visible when we were already within a dozen millions of miles. It was a jeweled world. Cities—the great, perfect cities—still glowed. They glowed in soft, golden light above, and below, the harsher,
brighter blue of mercury vapor lighted them.
“He was speaking again. ‘We are machines—the ultimate development of man’s. machines. Man was almost gone when we came.
“With what we have learned in the uncounted dusty megayears since, we might have been able to save him. We could not then. It was better, wiser, that man end than that he sink down so low as he must, eventually. Evolution is the rise under pressure. Devolution is the gradual sinking that comes when there is no pressure—and there is no end to it. Life vanished from this sys- tem—a dusty infinity I cannot sort in my memory—my type memory, truly, for I have complete all the memories of those that went before me that I re- place. But my memory cannot stretch back to that time you think of—a time when the constellations
“Tt is useless to try. Those mem- ories are buried under others, and those still buried under the weight of a billion centuries.
“We enter’-—he named a city; I can- not reproduce that name—now. You must return to Earth though in some seven and a quarter of your days, for the magnetic axis stretches back in collapsing field strains. I will be able to inject you into it, I believe.’
“So I entered that city, the living city of machines, that had been when time and the universe were young.
“TI did not know then that, when all this universe had dissolved away, when the last sun was black and cold, scat- tered dust in a fragment of a scattered universe, this planet with its machine cities would go on—a last speck of warm light in a long-dead universe. I did not know then.
“You still wonder that we let man die out?’ asked the machine. ‘It was best. In another brief million years he would have lost his high estate. It was best.
NIGHT 21
“Now we go on. We cannot end, as he did. . It is automatic with us.’
“T felt it then, somehow. The blind, purposeless continuance of the machine cities I could understand. They had no intelligence, only functions. These ma- chines—these living, thinking, reasoning investigators—had only one function, too. Their function was slightly differ- ent—they were designed to be eternally curious, eternally investigating. And their striving was the more purposeless of the two, for theirs could reach no end. The cities fought eternally only the blind destructiveness of nature, wear, decay, erosion.
“But their struggle had an opponent forever, so long as they existed. The intelligent—no, not quite intelligent, but something else—curious machines. were without opponents. They had to be curious. They had to go on investi- gating. And they had been going on in just this way for such incompre- hensible ages that there was no longer anything to be curious about. Who- ever, whatever designed them gave them function and forgot purpose. Their only curiosity was the wonder if there might, somewhere, be one more thing to learn.
“That—and the problem they did not want to solve, but must try to solve, be- cause of the blind functioning of their very structure.
“Those eternal cities were limited. The machines saw now that limit, and so the hope of final surcease in it. They worked on the energy of the atom. But the masses of the suns were yet tre- mendous. They were dead for want of energy. The masses of the planets were stillenormous. But they, too, were dead for want of energy.
“THE MACHINES there on Nep- tune gave me food and drink—strange,
synthetic foods and drinks. There had been none on all the planet. They, per- force, started a machine, unused in a
billion years and more, that-I might eat. Perhaps they were glad to do so. It brought the end appreciably nearer, that vast consumption of mine.
“They used so very, very little, for they were so perfectly efficient. The only possible fuel in all the universe is one—hydrogen. From hydrogen, the lightest of elements, the heaviest can be built up, and energy released. They knew how to destroy matter utterly to energy, and could do it.
“But while the energy release of hydrogen compounding to the heavy elements is controllable, the destruction of matter to energy is a self-regenera- tive process. Started once, it spreads while matter lies within its direct, con- tiguous reach. It is wild, uncontrollable. It is impossible to utilize the full energy of matter.
“The suns had found that. They had burned their hydrogen until it was a remnant so small the action could not go on.
“On ail Earth there was not an atom of hydrogen—nor was there on any planet, save Neptune. And there the store was not great. I used an appre- ciable fraction while I was there. That is their last hope. They can see the end, now.
“T stayed those few days, and the machines came and went. Always in- vestigating, always curious.. But there is in all that universe nothing to investi- gate save the one problem they do not want to solve—the problem they are
_sure they cannot solve.
“The machine took me back to Earth, set up something near me that glowed with a peculiar, steady, gray light. It would fix the magnetic axis on me, on my location, within a few hours. He could not stay near when the axis touched again. He went back to Nep- tune, but a few millions of miles distant, in this shrunken mummy of the solar system.
22
“T stood alone on the roof of the city, in the frozen garden with its deceptive look of life.
“And I thought of that night I had spent, sitting up with the dead man. I had come and watched him die. And I sat up with him in the quiet. I had wanted some one, any one to talk to.
“T did then. Overpoweringly it came to me I was sitting up in the night of the universe, in the night and quiet of the universe, with a dead planet’s body, with the dead, ashen hopes of countless, nameless generations of men and women. The universe was dead, and I sat up alone—alone in the dead hush.
“Out beyond, a last flicker of life was dying on the planet Neptune—a last, false flicker of aimless life, but not life. Life was dead. The world was dead.
“TI knew there would never be another sound here. For all the little remainder of time. For this was the dark and the night of time and the universe. It was inevitable, the inevitable end that had
been simply more distant in my day— in the long, long-gone time when the
Stars were mighty lighthouses of a mighty space, not the dying, flickering candles at the head of a dead planet.
“It had been inevitable then; the can- dles must burn out for all their brave_ show. But now I could see them gut- tering low, the last, fruitless dregs of
ASTOUNDING STORIES
energy expiring as the machines below had spent their last dregs of energy in that hopeless, utterly faithful gesture— to attempt the repair of the city already dead.
“The universe had been dead a billion years. It had been. This, I saw, was the last radiation of the heat of life from an already-dead body—the feel of life and warmth, imitation of life by a corpse. Those suns had long and long since ceased to generate energy. They were dead, and their corpses were giving off the last, lingering life heat before they cooled.
“T ran. I think I ran—down away from the flickering, red suns in the sky. Down to the shrouding blackness of the dead city below, where neither light, nor heat, nor life, nor imitation of life bothered me.
“The utter blackness quieted me some- what. So I turned off my oxygen valves, because I wanted to die sane, even here, and I knew I'd never come back.
“The impossible happened! I came to with that raw oxygen in my face. I don’t know how I came—only that here is warmth and life.
“Somewhere, on the far side of that bismuth coil, inevitable still, is the dead planet and the flickering, guttering can- dies that light the death watch I must keep at the end of time.”
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Derelict
by Raymond Z. Gallun
The monster was in full view now, its head raised to the level of Jan’s
eyes.
right of the Sun, its spherical hull half illumined and half in shadow. No ‘native of the solar system could have guessed either its age or its ori- gin. Battered, lifeless, desolate and for-
| DRIFTED there in space, to the
lorn, it betrayed a kinship both with the remote past and with the distant stars against the sharp pin points of which its bulk was limned.
Jan Van Tyren should have felt a surge of enthusiasm over his discovery
24 ASTOUNDING STORIES
of this derelict vessel of the void. Yet he did not. Within him there was room for little but the gnawing ache of grief. Listlessly preoccupied, he stood before the periscope screen of his own trim craft, watching with only a shadow of interest the spheroid pictured in it.
His big, loose body seemed to droop without animation before his instru- ments. A tuft of yellow hair protruded, cynical and slovenly, from beneath his leather helmet. All the strength had been drained out of him. His blue eyes were clouded, as if he gazed less at reality than at some horror of memory.
He had seen blood often during his years with the Jupiter company. He’d seen death and revolt. Such things were incidental to colonization, to progress. But Greta and little Jan— they had been safe. That any one, even the horrid Loathi of the Jovian moon, Ganymede, might harm them, had seemed inconceivable. His young The tor-
wife, his baby—murdered. turing vision of what had happened had been with him for days now. Three?
Four? He didn’t want to recall any- thing related to that vision.
He didn’t want to forget it either. Nor was it possible to forget. He kept hearing the weird screams of the Loathi echoing inside him; he kept seeing their long, keen beaks, and their batlike bod- ies swooping crazily out of the Gany- medean night. Here, where no one could observe, he allowed himself the relief of a silent snarl. The look on his gaunt, weather-beaten face was not an expression of hatred. He was past hatred. He was numb and lost, like an engine without a governor.
That was why he was out here in the void, with the cold stars around him. He was trying to escape from— he wasn’t completely sure what. He was going back to Earth to paint pic- tures, and to seek in its mellow at- - mosphere of peace something that was
lacking in the cruel environment of Joraanin, the outpost of which he had been master. He was quitting cold— returning home to heal his soul.
Small wonder then that even a space ship which had floated without aim across the light years, perhaps from an- other galaxy, could not awaken in him a spark of real enthusiasm. Mystery and the promise of adventure no longer had any direct appeal.
Yet Jan Van Tyren was still a crea- ture of habit. Though his mind was caught up in a maelstrom of pain, still the automatic part of him continued to function with some semblance of normalcy. He was an artist; so, almost unconsciously, the channels which his hobby had established in his brain began their intended work—taking note of form and color.
He saw the contrasts of light and shade playing their bizarre tricks with the details of the great globular hull. He saw the deep grooves that stray meteors had scored in a crisscross pat- tern on the lusterless gray shell of the derelict.
He took note of the slender rods pro- jecting like the prongs of a bur from the vessel’s form, and of: the rows of windows that met his gaze blankly, as if they were eyes that wondered in an uncomprehending way what he and his flier might be. All this could have been a picture that a man might paint, starkly beautiful against the black background of the universe.
Then-.too, Jan Van Tyren was an engineer by profession; and though he wished to leave such matters buried in the past, once more the habit of long experience had its way. Something deep in Jan’s being, detached from his other thoughts, wondered what marvels of invention and science a survey of the derelict might reveal.
These combined forces gave to him that small thread of interest. Life had no strong purpose any more, and he
DERELICT 25
was in no hurry to continue the two months of continuous flying that would bring him across the etheric desert to his native planet.
Van Tyren’s hands flashed over con- trols with careless ease, as if they moved without the guidance of his brain. The space boat turned, begin- ning the graceful curve that would bring it alongside the spheroid. Across the periscope screen stars reeled; then Jupiter appeared, a tiny belted bead millions of miles away. Around it were the specks of radiance that were its moons.
Finally the derelict came back into view, gigantic and near. It appeared to be some three hundred feet in diam- eter. The feeble light of the distant Sun shone on it, revealing in its lower hemisphere a ragged rent whose depths were shrouded in shadow.
JAN steered his flier into a position from which he could get a_ better glimpse of the interior of the spheroid,
beyond the torn opening in its shell. Spear points of light pierced the thick shadows there, revealing crumpled masses of metal. But there was suffi- cient room for his purpose.
Without considering the possible dan- ger of the move, and in fact quite in- different now to such danger, Jan worked the guide levers and throttle of his craft. There were sharp bursts of incandescence from its rocket vents. It turned, swaying; then glided into the hole in the side of the derelict and came to rest amid the wreckage.
With what might have been a frag- ment of his old active spirit, Jan Van Tyren donned space armor. But his memories were still with him. He cursed once. No, it was not really a curse; the fury was lacking. There was only anguish in it. It was like the whimper of a big dog with a thorn in its foot.
He climbed through the airlock, and
for a minute stood quietly, viewing his surroundings. Somewhere _ gravity plates continued to function in this an- cient wreck, for he had weight here— perhaps one third Earth-normal. Junk was everywhere in the cavernous in- terior, distorted and crumpled gro- tesquely. Yet the metal was bright and new.
Whatever colossal weapon had ripped the globular vessel open like this might have done so within the hour or a bil- ion years ago, as far as any one could tell from visual inspection. There was no air; oxides didn’t form; nothing moved, nothing changed. There was no sound in Jan’s ears save the rustle of his own pulse. It was as if time had stopped in this minute speck of the universe. Only the derelict’s aura of desertion, and the memory of the countless meteor scorings on its outer shell, suggested to Van Tyren its vast age.
Meteors are too rare to constitute a menace in the traveled lanes of the solar system, and in the interstellar void they are rare indeed. Lifetimes might go by before one of those minor collisions took place; and they were numbered in thousands.
Rearing from the débris was a stair- way. Jan learned later to think of it by that term, though it was not a stair- way such as men would find conven- ient to use. It was a pillar, fluted spi- rally after the fashion of the threads of a screw. At regular intervals pegs were set along these threads, to pro- vide a grip for some kind of prehensile member.
The pillar swept upward to meet a broad roof. Sunlight, stabbing in from space, awoke an opalescent gleam on the metal surfaces of this queer means of ascent to whatever lay in the bulk of the derelict overhead.
Jan took hold of the pegs on the fluted column, and with easy surges hoisted his loose, muscular frame to-
26 ASTOUNDING STORIES
ward the top. Beside the place where the pillar joined the ceiling was a trap- door. He fumbled with the lever that latched it. It slid aside, allowing him to pass through into a tiny square com- partment which appeared to have the function of an airlock—for there was another similar trapdoor in its roof.
The lower entrance had closed be- neath him, and now he unfastened the valve over his head and climbed into the chamber above.
DUST and silence and motionless mechanical grandeur reminiscent of the tomb of a dead Cyclops—that in brief was a description of the place. It was much larger than the room below. Through windows along one wall the Sun shone, gilding inert engines whose monstrous forms seemed capable of generating sufficient power to tear a planet from its orbit. Huge cylinders of opalescent metal reared upward.
Flywheels which on Earth would have weighed hundreds of tons, rested in
their pivot sockets. Cables, wires, and pipettes ran between colossal, generator- like contrivances. Crystal tubes stood in webby tripods, or were supported in framework attached to the ceiling; but no energy flowed in the delicate fila- ments that formed their vitals, and there was no way for a man to tell what purposes they were intended to fulfill.
Between the windows massive rods were mounted, pointing through the ex- ternal wall of the sphere, as the weap- ons of a battleship would do. What- ever the race that had been responsible for this outlay, it was certain that it had been a race of fighters.
Jan Van Tyren, browsing listlessly among these wonders of another solar system, obtained his first direct hint of what the owners of the ship had been like. Sinuous patches of gray ash, con- torted so as to still portray the agonies of death, sprawled here and there on the floor. Brown flakes, resembling bits
of parchment, were mixed with the ash —the remnant, probably, of chitinous exoskeletons.
The crew of the derelict had been slain. The pitted plating of the floor around the remains of each of their bodies, showed that clearly. Something hot and corrosive had blasted them out of existence. They had battled val- iantly, but they had been overcome.
Jan saw a silvery object lying be side one of the areas of ash. He picked it up. A mummified fragment of flesh, suggestive of the foot of a bird, clung to it, its three prehensile toes curved fiercely around the grip and trigger but- ton of the small weapon.
Yes, those unknowns had fought as men would do; but they had failed. Van Tyren’s set face exhibited a fleet- ting sneer as he hurled the object aside.
He went on with his explorations. The dust of remote mortality swirled up in the path of his careless feet, filling the Sunbeams from the windows with eddying motes. There was air here to support the motes; but whether it was breathable after the passage of ages seemed hardly probable.
Jan paused before a_ switchboard. His gauntleted hand fumbled hesitantly over a dial at its center. He turned the dial to the right. A faint vibra- tion was transmitted to his fingers. He turned the dial more, not knowing that his act was perhaps altering a detail in the normal course of destiny. The vi- bration increased. He stood back, wait- ing.
Beneath the framework mounting of the switchboard was a cabinet of smooth, tawny material. The front of it opened now, revealing a darkened interior. From the opening a slender head was thrust, swaying with rhythmic cadence from side to side. It had a single eye, as expressionless as the lens of a camera, which in truth the orb seemed to be.
There was no mouth in evidence, nor
DERELICT 27
any need of one; for this thing, though it presented characteristics commonly associated with living creatures, yet was marked with the unmistakable stamp of the machine. The triangular head had the purple gloss of the other met- allic objects in the room. The intri- cate appendages which projected around its throat, forming a sort of frilled col- lar, were of the same substance. Be- neath them the slender length of the thing was revealed as it crept in ser- pentine fashion from the cabinet. Its body was composed of thousands of glistening segments, as minutely tooled as the parts of a watch.
The monster was in full view now, its head raised to the level of Jan’s eyes. Instinctively he had backed away, though somehow the idea of danger did not occur to him. Perhaps he had left normal caution behind him on Gany- mede.
For a time, nothing more happened. The triangular head continued to sway from side to side, but that was all. Van Tyren stood statuesquely, his feet spread wide apart in bullish defiance directed not so much against this amaz- ing fabrication as against his own ach- ing memories. Even the tangible truth of this fantastic episode could not wholly smother the agony of the recent
Presently the serpentine robot turned and glided off among the surrounding
maze of machines. With a grace that was at once beautiful and abhorrent it writhed its way to an apparatus at the center of the room. Its glittering ap- pendages touched controls skillfully.
A BLAST of air surged from vents high up on the walls. Jan felt the thrust of it against his armor, and saw the ashes of the derelict’s dead crew go Swirling away into other vents along with the lifeless vapor that had been sealed for so many eons in this tomb of space.
In response to some further manipu- lation of dials and switches on the part of the robot, a light, restful blue began to burn in a crystal tube above Jan’s head. He looked up at it and it seemed to exert a soothing, hypnotic influence upon him. He did not even protest when the unknown that he had freed returned to his side and made a gentle attempt to remove his space armor. His own fingers closed on the fasten- ings and helped those delicate metallic members to complete the task.
Free of the cumbersome attire, he stood eagerly in those cool, blue rays. They appeared to probe to every cor- ner of his being, drawing all the ache and tension out of his tortured nerves.
The grief in his mind blurred to a diffused sweetness. At first he was almost terrified. It was sacrilege to let the thought of his wife and son fade away from him so. Then, no longer wishing to think, he*surrendered com- pletely to the healing, Lethean influence of the rays.
The air around him now was cold and refreshing. He sucked in great lung- fuls of it. He flexed his muscles in- dolently, and at last his rugged face broke into a smile. Somewhere music whispered—exotic music out of a time and region too distant to fathom.
The automaton was gliding here and there with no sound except a soft, slith- ering jingle. It was putting things in order, inspecting and readjusting this device and that. Jan wondered how many thousands of millenniums had gone by since any of those machines had been called upon to function. He wondered too at the unfathomable kind- dess of his queer host, and whether it had read his mind, learning of the pain that had crushed him.
But the rays made him inclined rather to accept than to question, and for a while he did not pursue his ideas further. He was in no hurry. He had not a care or responsibility in the uni-
28 ASTOUNDING STORIES
verse. There was plenty of time for everything.
After perhaps an hour under the tube of the blue light, Jan Van Tyren real- ized that he was hungry. Little food had passed his lips since the quick de- parture from Ganymede. He put on his space suit again, descended through the airlock by which he had entered this chamber and shinned down the spirally fluted pillar. Before he had reached the bottom the robot was de- scending above him, its flexible, snake- like body sliding easily in the spiral grooves. The thing had deserted its tasks to follow him.
JAN proceeded to gather certain
food articles from the store of concen- trated rations aboard his space boat. But before he had collected what he wanted, the automaton was beside him, trying to help. Jan attempted to shove those gleaming claws away, but they were persistent; and finally, in a mood
to accept the gentle suggestion, he capitulated, allowing the robot to take several containers from him.
“T think I know what you are.” Jan chuckled inside his oxygen helmet. “You were made to take care of the various small wants of the people who manned this ship. Now that there isn’t any one else to play servant to, you've picked me as your boss.”
He collected a few other articles—the sleeping bag of his flier, several astro- nomical instruments and the case con- taining his artist’s equipment—and thrust them into the waiting arms of the robot.
“Might as well take this stuff along too,” he said, “so I won’t have to climb down again and get it.”
He paused to see what the friendly mechanism would do next. The result was just faintly amusing. After a mo- ment of uncertainty it approached him. A stubby member which was part of the frill- of appendages around its
throat elongated itself like a telescope, coiled its metal length around his waist and hoisted him easily off his feet, Then the serpentine monster made its weaving way to the stair amd com- menced to ascend with its new master and the bulky equipment.
“Hey!” Van Tyren protested. “This is making a good thing too good! I’m not a cripple!”
But even though the automaton may have possessed a means of divining the telepathic waves of the thoughts behind Jan’s words, still it had its way with him.
The man, hardened and self-reliant though he had always been, accepted the mild, emasculating yoke of a mon- ster of which he really knew nothing, quite as trustingly as a child accepts the love of its mother. The blue ray was not penetrating his body here, but its care-effacing power still persisted. And he had no thought of the possibly dangerous consequences of the spell.
He remembered the Mercurian who had valeted one of the friends of his student days. Khambee was the Mer- curian’s name—a curious elf whose un- obtrusive yet insistent indulgence was much the same as that of this mechani- cal slave.
“Khambee the second,” Van Tyren pronounced good-naturedly, bestowing the nomen on the automaton that bore him. “It fits you.”
In the chamber of wonders beyond the airlock, Jan set out his meal and ate, while Khambee watched with his camera eye, as if to learn the intricacies of the task.
Then he crept through an opening in the wall and returned with a bowl con- taining cubes of a golden, translucent compound that emitted a pleasant odor. He set the bowl beside the man.
Van Tyren took one of the cubes, tasted it, and devoured it without con- sidering that, to his Earthly system, the substance.might be poisonous. But he
DERELICT 29
experienced no ill effects. The food was slightly fibrous, but sweet and tasty. He consumed more of it with relish.
The blue rays from the tube on the ceiling poured their lulling effulgence over him. The whisper of music, thin and threadlike and soothing, worked its magic upon his senses. Jan crouched on the floor, his head nodding against his knees.
So he remained for a long time, nei- ther awake nor quite asleep, his brain and nerves pervaded by a deliciously restful quasiconsciousness. Khambee had disappeared, perhaps to attend to some obscure matter in another part of the vessel.
SUCH was the beginning of Jan Van Tyren’s adventure on the derelict. As yet he gave the future no attention, living each careless moment as it came; thinking, but not too deeply. Never
before had the instinct of the empire builder in him been so completely sub-
merged.
Just to amuse himself he set up his astronomical ingtruments and took mi- nute ie of both Jupiter and the stars at’ intervals of an hour, to discover what sort of path the derelict was following. The angular change in the positions of those celestial land- marks told the story.
The vessel was a moon of the planet Jupiter, swinging around it slowly in an immense orbit many millions of miles across. Probably it had been do- ing so for eons before men had consid- ered seriously the problem of traffic between worlds.
The fact that it had never been dis- covered until he had stumbled upon it was easy to explain. Without guidance it would be simpler to find an individual gtain of sand on a beach, than to locate to small a satellite in the vastness of the etheric desert.
Now. however, with distances and
velocities measured perfectly, there would be no trouble in estimating where the vessel would be at a given second. Jan fumbled with the paper on which he had made his calculations, and then carelessly tossed it aside.
Like the good servant he was, Kham- bee, who happened to be present, picked it up and placed it in a little case fast- ened at his throat.
Looking at the stars gleaming so glo- riously in the ebon firmament had given Jan Van Tyren an inspiration,
“Men are fools,” he confided to Khambee. “Trouble and misfortune are all the reward they get for their struggles. It was the same with the serpent folk who made you. Those of them who formed the crew of this ves- sel were killed—murdered.
“Why can’t we escape from all that sort of nonsense, Khambee? Why can’t we fix up this ship so that it can travel out to the stars? What an ad- venture that would be! Vagabonding from one planet to another without any responsibilities, and without ever re- turning to the solar system! That would be something worthwhile, Kham- bee.”
Jan was only talking for companion- ship’s sake, attempting to give an idle dream a semblance of reality. He did not believe that what he spoke of was possible. There was the matter of food, water, and energy. It seemed unlikely that this decrepit derelict’s supply of each was sufficient for such a venture.
However, Khambee had greater pow- ers at his command than Van Tyren could guess. And there had been built into the inorganic frame of him an astute understanding that penetrated the very motives and purposes animating flesh, bone, nerves and brain tissue.
He appeared to listen attentively to the rustling thought waves of his hu- man master. Then, impelled by the complex urges which the genius of his creator had stamped indelibly into the
3% ASTOUNDING STORIES
metal and crystal intricacies of his be- ing, he returned to the tasks which he was meant to do.
And Jan Van Tyren, who had estab- lished and bossed Joraanin, the Gany- mede colony, continued with his idle play. He slept, he ate exotic foods, he wandered about the ship, he dreamed; but most of all he painted, setting up his easel wherever whim might sug- gest. And the marvels around him seemed, by their very aura of strange- ness, to direct and control his skillful fingers.
He painted great engines with shafts of Sunlight twinkling on them; he stud- ied the highlights that shifted elusively in the hollow grooves of the pillars which the sinuous folk of long ago had used as stairways, and he transferred the forms of those stairways to canvas.
He painted Khambee at work with a flaming welding tool, slim, efficient, and almost noiseless. He even painted
scenes and subjects of Earth and Gany-
mede—pleasant reminiscences, for all that was unpleasant had been shoved far into the background of his mind.
A white collie of his childhood. A jagged mountain jutting out of the red desert of Ganymede. Greta, blond and pretty and smiling. Little Jan with his stiff, yellow curls. Such were the subjects of his pictures. He thought of his wife and child, but only of the happy incidents of their lives together.
The horror was blurred and distant. The blue rays saw to that. And so a will not his own, and perhaps not even Khambee’s, but belonging to a serpen- tine monster dead for ages, controlled Jan Van Tyren.
At odd moments he watched space, and felt the yearning pull of the stars. Thus many days must have gone by. He did not bother to keep track.
THE TIME CAME when he was aroused from slumber by a throbbing
sound, soft, but eloquent of titanic forces at work. He crept out of his sleeping bag and stared at the source of the disturbance. Huge flywheels were spinning. He felt a powerful thrust as the ship’s propulsive equip- ment took hold for a fraction of a second.
Then Khambee, worming his slender shape like a weaving shuttle here and there among the machinery, broke the contacts of massive switches. The ac- tivity died to silence once more. But the test had been made and Jan sensed that it had been successful.
He hurried forward. “We've got enough power then?” he demanded huskily. “Have we?”
For an answer the robot opened the side of a cylindrical arrangement, and with the clawed tip of an appendage, pointed to the maze of coils and crystal that glowed with heat inside.
Jan studied the apparatus intently for several minutes. Much of it was beyond his grasp; but there were places where tangible fact corresponded with human theory. Energy from the cos- mic ray which exists everywhere in space. Limitless, inexhaustible energy! The engines of the vessel were worked by it.
“T see,” Van Tyren commented qui- etly. “The power problem is solved. Have we enough food, air, and water?”
Khambee led him through the laby- rinths of the ship to a place where he had never been before—a hall lined with vast, transparent tanks, most of them filled with a clear liquid that had been sealed up for ages. There was water enough here to make the ship a little world, independent of outside sources, since none could escape from the sealed hull.
Farther down the corridor were other tanks filled with preserved food sup- plies, and beyond them were extensive chambers where odd, bulbous things
DERELICT 31
were growing under the intense light of great globes.
Were those growths plants of some kind, or artificial cultures to be clas- sified somewhere between the organic ‘and the inorganic? Their color was deep-green. Was it chlorophyll, or a substance analagous in function to the chlorophyll of green plants? Perhaps it did not matter. Here food was be- ing produced under the action of the intense light.
Carbon dioxide, piped to these cham- bers from all parts of the craft, was being split up by those queer growths, and the oxygen in it was being freed to refresh the atmosphere of the ship. Khambee had started a process that had ben dead for uncounted millenniums; now it could go on indefinitely.
Nourishment, water and oxygen— everything essential to life had been taken care of.
“Speed?” Jan questioned. “Can we build up sufficient speed to travel be- . tween the stars without making the trip endless ?””
It was an important query. No man- built ship could have reached the outer galaxies in a lifetime, though there were experiments in progress which in a dec- ade or so might produce promising results,
Khambee’s tactile appendages swung toward a huge power-distributer tube near by in a gesture of confidence.
Jan was satisfied. “Then we're going,’ he said. “There’s not much left for me here in the solar system.”
His voice was steady, but the thrill of adventures to come made his heart pound and sent tingling prickles through his scalp muscles.
Khambee the unfathomable offered no protest, yet his actions indicated that there was work still to be done.
He clutched his master’s arm and drew him along gloomy passages to a storeroom filled with various machinery
parts and other supplies. Here he se- lected a great sheaf of metal plates, and bore it back to the airlock which opened into the wrecked compartment where Jan’s space boat was housed. The silvery length of him passed through 1t, lugging the heavy load.
Jan Van Tyren donned his air-tight armor and followed.
FOR SEVERAL HOURS he watched the slave robot patch the great rent. During that time the effects of the blue ray must have worn off; for presently, of his own volition, he tried to help, holding the massive plates steady while his snakelike henchman welded them into place with a flame tool. Khambee accepted the assistance with- out protest. f
Jan was more his own self now— cool, dominant, purposeful, making ready for a venture which no man had yet attempted.
At last the job was finished. The wreckage of an ancient battle was neatly cleared away, the jagged hole was covered, and only an oval door was left, through which the flier might pass when necessary.
The eye lens of the robot met Jan’s gaze briefly. “All is prepared,” it seemed to say.
Van Tyren nodded, his beaten face grim, hard, “Good!” he commented.
He shinned up the spiral pillar. Khambee was close behind, but he did not offer to help.
weather- smiling.
Nor did he go immediately to the
controls of the engines. Instead he drew the man to a broad, white screen, which was part of a complex apparatus near by. He snapped switches and twirled dials expertly.
Pictures appeared in the screen— bleak, rolling desert and _ tortured gorges. Then an oasis where there was water, and where the radioactive ores
32 ASTOUNDING STORIES
underground provided enough heat to permit the growth of vegetation. At its center was a little, rough city under a crystal dome. Joraanin, the Gany- mede colony!
Around it men and loyal Loathi were intrenched, fighting off hordes of rebel Loathi that circled on batlike wings above, their long beaks gleaming. The revolt was still in progress. A strong hand was needed there to end this chaos and death. Yes, needed. The Ben- sonium mines
Jan Van Tyren stood with the oxy- gen helmet in his hands, his mouth puckering pensively. A thousand thoughts swarmed in his brain; prob- lems which he was sure he'd thrashed out before. Impressions of courage, of fear, of loyalty and of love. The Loathi. Greta. Little Jan. Revenge. No, not revenge—censtructive codpera- tion. That was his policy. But he didn’t have a policy any more, did he? An empire builder. But he’d given up Or had he?
empire building.
Jan’s eyes roved the gleaming, seg- mented form of Khambee beside him. All at once truth came out of the mud-
dle. He saw one of the robot’s pur- poses clearly at last. Khambee had been the slave of a fighting race. A worker, and when the occasion demanded—a dealer. He, Jan Van Tyren, had been healed and freshened. His sense of
responsibilities to come had returned, and he was ready for them now.
“TI suppose I could still choose to leave the solar system, and you would obey me,” he said. “But you probably knew all along what my final choice would be. Return to your cabinet, Khambee. I’m going back to Joraanin —alone. It’s my job.”
Khambee helped him gather his vari- ous possessions together, and to carry them down to the space boat. The exit door of the compartment rolled aside. Sunlight stabbed inward, causing the automaton’s body to reflect a thousand shifting, iridescent colors.
Just as Van Tyren was entering the flier, Khambee thrust a paper into his hands. It was the paper on which Jan had recorded his astronomical measure- ments and had calculated the orbit and velocity of the derelict.
He felt more than ever that Kham- bee could read his innermost thoughts. There was a bit of tightness in his throat then.
“Thanks, Khambee,” he said very seriously. “This might be useful. I may want to come back some time. I may need to come back.”
The flier was in space. Jan Van Tyren hummed a tune that was lost in the growl of the rockets. Ahead lay Jupiter and its satellites. Beyond them the bright stars seemed to smile.
| Islands of the San
by Jack Williamson
V.
WELVE DAYS MORE, per- haps,” said Teddu Len. “Then we are done.”
The old scientist was sitting with Ken in an office in the fortress. Heavy, in-
AST—3
(Con-
clusion)
sulated walls shut out the pitiless heat of the prison planet; cool air rustled from a ventilating fan; the room was soft with the roseate, filtered rays of a photon disk.
Sinl Mran, plump, pink-cheeked, en-
34 ASTOUNDING STORIES
ergetic, was with them. All three wore bandages. But they were washed, re- freshed, comfortable.”
Ken, a little reluctantly, for he had wished the place to be Teddu Len’s, sat at the commandant’s desk. The revolt- ing miners had been organized into a fighting unit; Ken Darren in command, Teddu Len and Sinl Mran beneath him.
“In twelve days,” repeated Teddu Len, “the fleet can be here from Nydron— and bombs falling on this building.”
“The weapon you invented?” asked Ken. “Would it save us now?”
“The device, you mean, that I planned as I lay in the torture cell? It is an atomic power wave, carried upon a tight beam of subelectronic radiation, which will penetrate the dynamic space shell. It would be a powerful agency of de- struction—but we cannot build it.”
“Why not? We have shops, materi- als rs
“Each projector requires the use of a crystal of okal—without it the instan- taneous generation of atomic energy is impossible.”
Ken’s heart sank.
“Always we need okals,” he mut- tered. ‘We can’t save the planets with- out the great one that Dakkil Kun has. And we can’t recover it for want of a small one.”
Little Sin] Mran had let out a startled exclamation.
“We have an okal, Ken,” he cried ex- citedly. “I saw it. It is one some pris- oner found long ago. It has been kept hidden, passed from man to man. It made life here endurable; its beauty is like a refreshing drink.”
“How large Pe
“It is small as a grain of sand—but a grain of perfect beauty.”
“Let us see it,’ commanded Teddu Len eagerly. “Perhaps a
Word went out. Within a few min- utes the jewel was in the old man’s hand. It was a minute and perfect sphere, harder than diamond. The touch
of his skin set strange, soft fires to blazing in it, so that it burst up with a wondrous, changing, many-hued radi- ance.
“It will do,” said Teddu Len. “J shall draw plans for the penetrator and have the parts made.” Gloomily, he added: “But the thing is untried, and we are yet marooned on Kardon.”
“But it gives us a fighting chance,” said Ken.
His hard chin set and his level, gray eyes darkened with grim purpose.
“We can fight,” returned the thin, tired old voice of Teddu Len. “But Dakkil Kun has the geodesic fleets, and the forts on Nydron. And the flame creatures are with him, with their dread science and their great black ships.”
Eleven days later the fleet was sighted, descending upon the fortress. The alarm brought Ken to the top of the great building. Beyond the shelter- ing canopy, he came under the white and featureless sky. Streaming with tears, even behind dark lenses, his eyes peered up into the dome of pitiless heat —and found the ships.
Out of a sea of white flame, the geo- desic fliers were drifting down; huge and shimmering bubbles of mirrorlike refulgence, their surfaces were nowhere broken. Nine of them he counted, floating down over the dark, age-leveled horizons of flame-seared Kardon.
The “penetrator” was close beside him, a relatively small mechanism, the minute okal lost in a mass of intricate tubes and coils. It was sheltered be- neath a dome-shaped shield which also- protected Teddu Len and his two assist- ants.
“They are coming within range,” called the thin voice of the old inventor.
“Wait,” called Ken. “One ship is coming ahead. Let them land it if they wish. Perhaps they want to parley.”
He watched, shading his smarting eyes.
“Yes, they are coming in. I'll go
ISLANDS OF THE SUN 35
aboard myself and offer to surrender the mines, undamaged, in return for a ship.”
“No chance that they’d do that,”” mut- tered Teddu Len.
“But—somehow—we must have a
ship.”
The vast, silvery sphere hung for a moment, silent, motionless, above the arms of the cradle, a bubble of mirror whiteness, its fulgor blinding in the ter- rible light, its unmarred perfection al- most unreal.
Then the dynamic space shell was gone. The dull, copper-red of the hull, broken with rivet heads, air-lock and ports, caked with greenish oxides, col- lapsed into the cradle.
A petty officer came off to announce, importantly :
“Lar Radnu, Admiral of the Fleet of Dakkil Kun, Lhundar of the Planets, wishes to speak with the leader of the rebels here.”
With a word to Teddu Len and Sinl Mran to keep on the alert, Ken followed the officer aboard. Within the great, cylindrical chamber of the ship’s air- lock, he met Lar Radnu.
Little more than a boy, yet the ad- miral had an erect pride that became the winged insignia on his cap, the slen- der neutron gun at his belt. His thin face, twisted with the livid disfigure- ment of that long scar, was firmly set, composed as if with a deep, enduring purpose.
He came forward quickly to take Ken’s hand, his dark, somber eyes warmed by a little smile.
“I .remember you,” he said, in his low, even voice. “Your name is Ken Darren. You are the man from Pylos who spoke of his loyalty—love—for our lost Princess Wyndonee.”
Again the break of the low: voice, the brightness of tears in those dark eyes.
And again Ken felt a quick pulse of sympathy for this straight young officer. Briefly he wondered if he, also, might
not have loved Wyndonee, and with more hope than Ken. And he was puz- zled again that such a man should be serving Dakkil Kun.
“IT did love Wyndonee,” said Ken Darren. “I should have given my life to save her—gladly. Now I am going to offer it as I think she might have wished—in the service of mankind.
“So long as I live,” he went on, in a quiet, grim voice, “I am going to fight your master, Dakkil Kun. I am ready
to die in the service of Teddu Len, to save the planets and humanity.”
A FAINT GLEAM of surprise came into the dark eyes of Lar Radnu. His firm lips opened a little. Ken thought that his dark, composed face betrayed a slight, incredulous hope.
“Tf you have come to parley,” Ken went on, “we can offer you this:
“The mines here are valuable. We are able to destroy them. We will sur- render them to you, intact, in return for a ship and freedom to leave Kardon. But we cannot surrender the right to fight ; it is more precious than our lives.”
Lar Radnu seemed hardly to have heard. His sober, piercing eyes were fixed upon Ken with a singular intent- ness.
“Did you say’—his low voice was tensely vibrant—‘“that the scientist, Teddu Len, has a plan to save the plan- ets?”
“He has,” Ken told him.
“But how?” demanded Lar Radnu. “Dakkil Kun has given the beings of flame the tensors of subspace curvature. They can, whenever they will, unlock the etheric spheres and consume the planets with the flame of the Sun.”
“His plan,” said Ken, “is to lift the planets out beyond the surface of the Sun, to safety from the xyli and the Sun’s heat.”
“He could do—that ?”
The young officer was rigid with in- credulous wonder.
36 ASTOUNDING STORIES
“He has devised the necessary equip- ment. The thing can’t be done, how- ever, without the use of a great okal, which I found, and Dakkil Kun stole from me.”
“Then it could never be done,” said Lar Radnu bitterly. “There is no weapon that will reach out through the dynamic space shell. The Lhundar sur- rendered for want of such a weapon, because he could not save his people from the heat bombs of the xyli.
“Again it would be the same. Dak- kil Kun and his dread allies would de- stroy us before the equipment could be made and the planets moved.”
“But there is a weapon,” protested Ken. “Teddu Len’s penetrator. It is untried. But he says it would destroy this ship in an instant.”
Ken Darren was surprised at the next action of the admiral.
Quietly, with a grave, unostentatious dignity, the slender young officer re- moved his cap with its white-winged in- Signia, stripped off his belted neutron gun, and knelt to present the two to Ken.
“What,” mean ?”
“The penetrator,” said the young ad- miral gravely, “has conquered the fleet of the Lhundar, Dakkil Kun. I now surrender the fleet to you. If you wish to return my insignia, I shall be glad to remain in command, under-your orders.”
Sudden tears glittered in his dark eyes. “I shall be glad to serve under you in the defense of humanity against Dakkil Kun and the creatures of flame.”
Ken’s throat was aching suddenly, and his lips were quivering and stiff, so that he could not reply. Silently, he returned the weapon and the cap, gripped the firm hand of Lar Radnu.
“T have been taking the orders of Dakkil Kun,” said Lar Radnu, in a shaken voice, “because there was no al- ternative, no opportunity to fight. I
asked Ken, “does this
might have killed myself, as did the late Lhundar, but for some mad hope——” His voice broke.
“Until this moment,” said Ken, when he could speak, “all our plans seemed folly. Now we have a chance to win.”
“Yet it is a slender chance,” reminded Lar Radnu. “Dakkil Kun still guards the great okal in the fortresses of Ny- dron. The black ships of the flame creatures are still at his command. And the xyli have still the power, whenever they will, to flood all the planets with heat.
“For all we have done and all we can do, mankind may perish yet, like midges in a furnace.”
VI.
THE MASS of the fortress fell away. It became a white polygon against the dark waste of Kardon’s burned, lifeless landscape. Against the white flame of the pitiless sky, nine geodesic ships floated upward, envel- oped in the argent, shimmering bubbles of their dynamic space shells.
“A black ship!” The warning elec- trified the fleet. “A spy!”
But the briefly glimpsed flier of the xyli was gone when the fleet slipped through the eon-weakened, gradually collapsing etheric sphere in which Kar- don had been born and came again into the solar photosphere.
An unreal globe of burning silver, the prison planet fell away behind. The fleet swept onward through the Sun— through a featureless void of golden flame, measured in millions of miles. Through a sea of fire, torn by the ter- rific scarlet storms of Sun-spots, broken only by the minute islands of the plan- ets, it drove toward Nydron.
Days went by. The mother planet swam at last into view—a white spark wrapped in xanthic flame. It grew to be a gigantic globe of polished silver. Then the ultrawave operator brought
ISLANDS OF THE SUN 37
Ken Darren a message that ended all hope of surprising Dakkil Kun.
To Ken Darren, slave, and the vermin with him:
My greetings, and make yourselves ready to die. For your rebellion and the treason of Lar Radnu have been antici- pated, and the xyli, my loyal allies, are prepared to defend the planets they have purchased and paid for.
Dakkil Kun, Lhundar of the Planets.
Another hour, and the black ships followed.
Standing in the long control room, Ken Darren was watching one of the great vision disks. An abyss of hot, golden radiance filled it—the illimitable fiery sea of the Sun. Nydron, within the silvery splendor of her protecting etheric sphere, hung like a white bubble in that gulf of flame.
Out of that bubble came the ships of the xyli.
They were black specks, scores of them. They grew into the arrows of Their glint-
slender, tapering vessels. ing, dark sides were marked with rows
of ports. At the sharp stern of each flickered the hot violet of its propulsion disk. They were gigantic, and they moved with the grace and the swiftness of a strange, incredible power.
Watching them, Ken drew in his breath with awe-struck, unwilling ad- miration.
“They are beautiful,” he whispered, “and dreadful. Like the patterned ser- pents of the hills of Pylos. And the builders of them are to be the masters of the planets when mankind is dead.”
Then a faint and misty cone of light reached out from the bow of one black ship. The color of it was a deep orange, verging upon redness. It fastened upon one geodesic flier, the Explorer. The attacked ship veered back and forth a little. But its movements were clumsy ; It quickly became helpless.
The cone seemed to thicken; it dark- ened, curdled. And the silvery en-
velope of the dynamic space shell ab- ruptly vanished from the Explorer.
Its naked, riveted hull was at first starkly black against the golden flame of the Sun. But it began to glow quickly and increasingly red, heated by the terrific radiation. Abruptly it sagged off its course and fell toward the fiery core of the Sun.
In a frantic voice, Ken spoke into the tube which connected with Teddu Len. The old scientist was with his penetrator which had been installed in a turret in the hull.
“Teddu!” he cried. “Do you see the Explorer? It is falling.”
A thinned, metallic rasp—the old man’s voice—came back from a vibrat- ing diaphragm:
“Yes, Ken, I see. The orange ray breaks up the space shell with the inter- ference of a heterodyning field. Power of propulsion is lost with the tripolar field, and the ship is shielded no longer from the solar gravitation "
Maddened by the detached, scientific calm of the old man’s voice, Ken broke in: “Can’t you do something? The heat will be through her hull in mo- ments ¥
Horror choked off his voice as he watched the falling flier. The orange cone had swung down to follow its plunging flight. Its doomed hull was a vivid, canary yellow, now. He shud- dered, picturing the oven within it, its crew shrieking, dying, roasting.
“No, I can’t save it,” rasped the old voice from the diaphragm.
And beneath its calm, Ken now sensed the agony of sympathy; he real- ized that the scientist, for all his cool self-control, was suffering with those tortured men.
“T had not anticipated that they could strike so quickly—so dreadfully,” said that dull voice of pain. “The pene- trator wasn’t ready. The deflector fields are building up now, with the subelec- tronic wave. The atomic power is so
38 ASTOUNDING STORIES
intense that no metal can withstand it. It must be generated and directed past the dynamic shell by curves in space itself. The subelectronic wave creates a tube field through hyperspace ”
The words ended in a sob of pain.
Ken was watching the Explorer. Her hull was blue-white now, and swiftly dwindling far below, as it hurtled down into the Sun’s intolerable abyss. The orange ray suddenly left it, flickered out. And the doomed flier flattened, col- lapsed, and melted into a brief flare of colored flame.
An instant, and no trace remained of the ship within the xanthic void.
“The deflector fields are generated,” rasped the voice of Teddu Len. “In a moment—now——”
AS that quiet, deadly word whispered from the speaker, Ken looked back into the golden disk of the screen. His eye
caught the briefest flash, as if a needle- thin, white blade had darted from the Victory, his own ship, toward the long,
black cylinder of the murderer.
Immediately, where that instantly vanishing white needle had touched, the black hull glowed with intolerable white- ness. A disk of white radiance spread, inconceivably hotter than the golden flame of the Sun. The black hull, crushed by terrific forces, its fragments fusing, crumpling, was swallowed in that expanding brightness.
The white glow slowly faded against the golden gulf. And when it was gone, no trace remained of the black vessel, marvelously refractory to heat though the alloys of its hull had been.
While that whiteness still flamed, the calm voice of Teddu Len spoke again:
“The penetrator is successful. The effect exceeds my expectations. It is equivalent to the instantaneous atomic disruption of half a pound of copper within the enemy hull. The accumu- lators can be charged and discharged
every fourteen seconds, so long as our supply of copper lasts.”
His voice was still vibrating from the diaphragm when that white, blinding needle of light stabbed briefly out again, and another black arrow was converted into an orb of white flame.
“Now,” the thin voice rasped again, “they will attack the Victory. They must realize that we carry the only weapon.”
True, from the four nearest of the black ships, the misty, expanding cones of orange radiance reached out. Their meshing funnels caught the Victory, Each of them thickened toward redness,
Instantly, above Ken, the vision screens blazed with white light, and then went black. He knew that the shielding space shell was already gone, that it was the full impact of the Sun’s radiation which had burned out the am- plifiers.
Warning lights sprang out, many- colored, in the sudden darkness. Alarm gongs clanged. The tortured ship was protesting the consuming breath of the Sun against her naked hull. She was blind, disabled.
Ken felt the ship veer and plunge, as a voice quavered out of the dark, thin with terror: “The drive field is gone! We're falling after the Ex- plorer.”
Teddu Len, in his exposed turret, would be helpless, first to perish.
From somewhere came a thick, sob bing scream: “The heat—heat—kill ing me!”
Ken Darren staggered blunderingly forward through the confusing dark- ness, then stopped himself, trembling. This, he knew, must be the end. Oddly, it mattered little that it was the end of himself. It was the end of the plan to save the planets, that was what counted. It was the end of mankind.
He stood there in the dark, helpless, momentarily expecting the hot breath of death. His personal regrets were two:
» Our
n the ding gain, erted
gain, They only
| the ‘ones Their tory. ness, ision
and the zone, Sun's
ISLANDS OF THE SUN 39
He was sorry that he should never again know the beauty of the great okal. And he regretted the murdered loveliness of the lost Wyndonee.
Then out of the darkness came the casp of Teddu Len’s voice:
“That is the fourth. Restore the space shell before the hull is too hot. Fortunately, I had set up a secondary shell to shield my turret. That kept them from blinding me or interfering with the penetrator.”
Men were suddenly busy in the dark- ness ; panic became efficient order. The vision screens flashed back into radi- ance. And Ken knew that death was put away again.
Above the argent bubble of Nydron still hung the black arrows—most of them. But the nearest five now, were merely fading disks of white flame. As he looked, another was consumed.
“That,” said Teddu Len, “should be enough.”
And Ken saw, in a moment, that the black arrows were wheeling, retreating. Two more were caught as they fied away into the higher levels of the photo- sphere, toward the weird, colossal fly- ing cities of the xyli.
The eight surviving geodesic fliers drove on, presently, toward the silvery envelope of Nydron.
“Without the xyli, Dakkil Kun is doomed,”’ Ken Darren told Teddu Len, drunk with the elation of victory. “The people will surely rise to aid us. When Dakkil Kun is crushed, and the okal recovered, every man will work to help build the field units for the planets. We'll have them driving up out of the Sun before a hundred days have gone.
“And Dakkil Kun,” he muttered grimly, “will pay for what he did to Wyndonee.”
Teddu Len, standing over his pene- trator, rubbed his lean chin, doubtfully.
“The xyli retreated,” he said slowly. “But they aren’t conquered. They might have destroyed us in a concerted
attack. They simply chose to wait. They must still desire the planets, with their safety from the solar storms.
“No,” he repeated, “we shall meet the flame creatures again. Nor, I sus- pect,” he added, “has Dakkil Kun shot his last bolt.”
His gloomy predictions were justi- fied, a day later, when the eight ships descended into their cradles upon the great field by Kothri.
No attempt had been made to oppose the landing. Teddu Len’s long vigil by the penetrator had been needless. When the Victory’s air-lock opened, Ken has- tened out to meet a group of officers on the field.
THAT MOMENT, when he should set foot on Nydron, was one that long had lived before him. He was elated with victory, proud of the fleet and the hardy men behind him.
The sky of Nydron was a pale dome of silver; the cool air refreshed him with the tonic of eternal spring. Ken stood for a moment, filling his lungs joyously and looking across the great field where the Titanic reddish globes of geodesic fliers lay motionless in their cradles.
Beyond the field he could see the towers of Kothri—slender, fluted col- umns of argent, resting upon broad, truncated pyramids that were terraced with greenery and vivid bloom. Tears started into his eyes; the tension of emotion closed over his chest. Always he had desired to come to Kothri, so.
A shadow darkened his face, then, and bitterness lined it. And he shud- dered with the sudden agony gnawing in his breast. For the slender, blue- eyed loveliness of Wyndonee had come back to him, and the soft huskiness of her voice had whispered at his ear.
And he knew, abruptly, that he had wished to come to Kothri because it was her home. And all his elation
40 ASTOUNDING STORIES
turned to corrosive bitterness because her loveliness was dead.
He stood there, lost in pain. And bleak centuries seemed to flow past him. Despair sank its cold fingers into his throat. Then he flung his head, seek- ing to recover himself, and strode for- ward to meet the group of eager, wek coming officials.
“I am Marron Blen, Underlord of Kothri,” began one portly personage. He was gaudy in colored silks ; his voice had an oily thickness. “On behalf of my city, I thank you for repelling the fleets of the xyli, and for ridding us of our oppressor, the tyrant Dakkil Kun who——”
“Where is Dakkil Kun?” Ken’s sharp question cut in.
“Dakkil Kun is gone,” said Marron Blen, a little affronted at the interrup- tion. “The dictator has fled.”
“Fled?” rapped Ken. “Where?”
“A private geodesic flier had been built for him in the yards here,” said the official. “The largest ever built.
It is armed with the weapons of the
xyli. It carries supplies enough to last generations. Everything a
“He has escaped?” Ken again inter- rupted. “In that?”
“He has gone. All was ready. When you defeated his allies in the battle be- yond the etheric sphere, the tyrant knew that all was lost. He went aboard with the criminal gang he brought from the prison planet, with their slaves and women ‘a
“Where did he go?”
“Who knows?” Marron Blen shrugged, obviously displeased at Ken’s incisive manner. “At full power, they drove out through the etheric sphere. They were moving in the direction of the cities of the xyli, above.”
Ken looked back toward the loom- ing, rugged, copper-red hull of the Victory.
, “We must pursue—if it isn’t already too late.”
“But why?” demanded the piqued official. ‘You have delivered us. We are well rid of Dakkil Kun.”
“He has a jewel of okal,’ Ken ex- plained swiftly. “We must take it back from him. If we fail to recover it, it means the death of every planet, by fire.”
“Nonsense!” puffed the portly Mar- ron Blen. “The xyli wanted the plan- ets for themselves—but they are de- feated. You routed their black fleet. We are safe.”
“Safe?” echoed Ken. sky.”
His keen eyes had noted the flicker. The pallid, silver sky had become brighter, at first imperceptibly, but ever more swiftly. White flame flushed it, growing more intense. Ken fancied a sudden, new heat in the air against his cheek.
“What is this?” muttered Marron Blen. The red of annoyance was fad- ing from his thick jowls. His pasty face became a sickly white. Weakly, he stammered: “The sky! It’s blind- ing! What does this mean?”
“Dakkil Kun sold the planets to the flame creatures,” Ken briefly reminded him. “According to the bargain, they were not to claim them until Dakkil Kun was dead. But now that he has run off upon the ship where he must mean to spend the rest of his life, they have already turned their rays upon the etheric sphere. And now that the etheric sphere has been weakened, it can never be restored.
“You see the flame in the sky. It will remain there, until all life is swept from Nydron. Until every tree and shrub, every clump of grass, every building of man, bursts into flame. It will blaze until the dead continents are black deserts, and the seas dried to wastes of salt. Until the mountains begin to fuse and run down in rivers of lava.
“And when it is hot enough, the flame
“Look at the
ISLANDS OF THE SUN
“We must lose Lar Radnu and bring back to Kothri the lost Wyndonee.”
42 ASTOUNDING STORIES
creatures will bring their cities here, for safety from the storms of the Sun.” “Impossible,” whispered the fat man. Gazing blankly into the new, hot white- ness of the sky, he mopped sweat from his flaccid face. Incredulously, he shook the puffy ball of his head. “That cannot be. You're a madman.” “No,” Ken Darren told him, grimly, “Dakkil Kun is the madman. And his madness has destroyed the human race.”
VII.
BACK within the air-lock, Ken Dar- ren met the alert young admiral, Lar Dadnu, and thin, old Teddu Len. Their grave, anxious faces told him that they knew.
“The heat has come,” he said.
The old scientist nodded wearily. “The okal?” he asked.
“Dakkil Kun has fled, in a new ship. He must have taken it.” And Ken asked, anxiously: “Is there time, still —to save the planets ?”
“Possibly,” said the old man, slowly. “By conscripting every man, every ma- chine, every resource.
“But we must have the okal,” he
added. “Nothing can save a single planet, unless it is recovered. There are others, but all of them together would not yield power enough to lift the smallest planet.”
“Then we'll get it,” said Ken, grimly. “Even if we have to follow Dakkil Kun all the way to the flying cities of the flame beings.”
He looked at trim, slender Lar Radnu. The dark eyes of the young admiral flashed in reply to his glance. The composure of his scar-disfigured face was twisted by a quiet little smile.
“We will,” said Lar Radnu, gravely.
His artistically small hand gripped Ken’s, warmly.
“We can try,” said Teddu Len. “But remember—we haven't met the full strength of the xyli. When we met
their fleet, they retired to prevent fur- ther losses. But they must have far greater weapons to defend their cities. We couldn’t hope to enter them, and live. We can only hope to overtake Dakkil Kun before he finds refuge there.”
“And his new ship,” whispered Lar Radnu, soberly, “must be as fast as the Victory.”
“We must recover the okal, some- how,” replied Ken. “Let’s go.”
The air-lock was soon sealed, the dynamic space shell snapped about the hull. And the great field dropped away, until the huge ships lying there looked small as eggs in a nest. The emerald terraces and white towers of Kothri dwindled to a neat, checkered pattern. The planet’s etheric envelope, blazing with white radiance, flickered behind.
The Victory leaped upward again, through the golden flame of the photo- sphere. The sphere of white Nydron dropped away beneath it; it became an unreal silvery ghost; it was swallowed in xanthic fire-mist.
An anxious day dragged away.
Searching the golden void that filled the vision panel, using the utmost pene- tration and magnification of the ampli- fication circuits, Ken at last discovered the fugitive flier. It was a minute pin point of silver, thickly veiled in the glowing mists.
Hour upon hour he manipulated the controls to hold it upon the screen while the Victory drove on toward it at her utmost speed. Again and again he lost it in some thickening of the xanthic haze; it never appeared nearer.
“Their speed is at least as great as ours,” he reported to Teddu Len. “And I think they know we are following. We'll never overtake them before they find safety in the flying cities of the xyli.”
He stood in the little armored turret in the hull, staring dejectedly down at the stooped figure of the old scientist
ISLANDS OF THE SUN
who was busy with the intricate mech- anism of his penetrator.
“There is something,” replied Teddu Len, speaking absently, without looking up, “that I can try. An adaptation of the tube-field set up through hyper- space by my subelectronic wave. I can penetrate their dynamic space shell, tap the tripolar field that drives them d
His voice trailed away as his fingers completed some adjustment, and his mind found a new problem. And pres- ently his strange tubes glowed again; and the tiny okal flamed with the pure light of a star. <A rustling whisper filled the small turret.
In the vision screen, a pale finger of greenish -light was visible. Reaching out from the Victory, it seemed to dis- solve in the golden void. Watching the white mote of the fleeing ship, Ken saw it pause in its flight.
“You have stopped them!” he called eagerly. “How?”
“I’m draining away the energy of their drive field. With the full power at my command, I could send them plunging toward destruction in the core of the Sun.”
THE Victory bore down upon the helpless fugitive. It was a ball of sil- ver, swung in the gulf of golden flame. Far above it, beyond it, were dark shadows, odd cloudy masses floating high in the void.
“Those shadows,” said Lar Radnu, are the cities of the xyli—their strange flying dwellings, built of the same black alloys as their ships. If Dakkil Kun had reached them, he might have found safety.”
Ken dispatched a message upon the ultrawave signal ray to the other flier:
“
Dakkil Kun: We demand that you sur- render the great okal. Allow us to ap- proach and expand our space shell to in- close both fliers, so that we may take it aboard through joined air-locks. Do so, and you may go free.
Then came the taunting reply:
Ken Darren, slave: If you want the okal, find it. If you still desire Princess Wyndonee, know that you shall soon be with her—in death! And know that my allies, the xyli, can defend what is theirs.
Ken dispatched an immediate an- swer:
You are at our mercy. You cannot es- cape. We have a weapon which would obliterate your ship in an instant. Sur- render the jewel and save your lives.
The reply to this was a cone of misty orange radiance—the ray reaching out to strip away the shield of the Victory’s space shell, exposing her hull to the heat of the Sun.
A white blade of flame flickered out from the penetrator, probed the silvery bubble of the other flier. And the orange cone ceased to exist.
“A judiciously adjusted discharge,” commented Teddu Len. “It must have fused the piece of apparatus com- pletely.”
A few minutes later another message came over the ultrawave. Even in the cold words, Ken could sense the mad, consuming hatred that had wrung all the warm blood of humanity out of Dakkil Kun,had left but a grim de- stroyer.
We are helpless. Yet you are at our mercy. I cannot escape; I cannot fight. But I can die—as you will die, and the rest of your vermin called men. If you think the great okal would save you— find it.
Even as Ken looked up from the message to the golden disk of the screen, he saw the bright sphere of the space shell flicker away from the other flier.
Its naked hull plunged downward through the yellow abyss. At first it was starkly black; in a moment it was glowing cherry-red. Beneath the ter- tific acceleration of solar gravitation, it
“4 ASTOUNDING STORIES
was hurtling toward the unendurable heart of the Sun.
For a moment Ken staggered, numbed, shaken with horror at this last, suicidal gesture of hatred.
Then he sprang toward Lar Radnu.
“Put the Victory beside it,’ he shouted. “Expand our dynamic shell to inclose both ships. We'll storm their air-lock and search for the okal.”
“The shell will be weakened by the expansion,” objected Lar Radnu. “Our field can’t support both ships. The Vic- tory will fall with them. There will be increasing leakage of radiation. The time will be short—and we in danger of perishing with them.”
“We must try,” said Ken.
But Lar Radnu already was giving swiftly-voiced commands.
Air-lock was sealed against air-lock, within the space shell weakened by ex- pansion. As both ships continued to plunge into the core of the Sun, their hulls heating under the radiation leaking through, neutron blasts cut a way through the metal valve.
Ghastly silence greeted Ken as he led a party aboard to search for the great okal. The doomed crew had not waited to die in the collapse of their fusing vessel. Dead men and women stared at the intruders, some still clutch- ing the weapons with which they had destroyed themselves.
High in the silent hulk, however, Ken heard a wail of music. It led him into a magnificent, barbarically splendid chamber, gaudily rich with jeweled tap- estries. Pallid, rosy light streamed down through cool, perfumed air.
In the middle of the room was a long table, set with glittering crystal and pol- ished metal, burdened with elaborate pastries and vivid-hued fruits and tall flagons of wine. Two score men and women sat at that silent board, glitter- ing in the plundered wealth of Kothri, gorgeously jeweled and gowned and
painted.
Dakkil Kun sat at the middle of the table, and of the forty, only he was living. Upon either hand was a woman who had been beautiful, already rigid and glassy-eyed in death. He rose when Ken entered the room, in his thick, hairy hand an emerald cup of pale wine.
Ken had not seen him since that day upon Pylos when they had killed the tiger in the cavern and Ken had found the great okal. But still he looked the same: a squat and massive giant, blue- black of hair, his swarthy skin bulging with thick muscles. His eyes, dark and quick and small as always, held a feral wildness. His heavy, cruel-lipped face bore a slow and leering grin, stamped with the cunning of insanity.
He stood there, smiling queerly at Ken. One thick, dark hand rested in- solently upon the cold, marble shoulder of the corpse at his left; with a mock- ing gesture, the other held high the em- erald cup.
“Welcome, Ken Darren, my old com- panion,” he said thickly.
His voice was the voice of a man very drunk—not with wine only, but with mad passion and consuming, tri- umphant hate.
“You are late for my final feast,” he said. “But come and sit with me—in the arms of my lovely companion.”
And he waved the green cup un- steadily, toward the dead woman at his right.
“Sit and drink. The wine is poi- soned. But this is the time, of all times, to drink poisoned wine.”
KEN was trembling, sick with the
horror of this mad tableau. But he forced himself to step forward, to speak persuasively :
“Dakkil, please listen to me! If you care nothing for mankind, listen for the sake of our old friendship.”
“Of course you are my friend, Ken,”
ISLANDS OF THE SUN 45
came the thick, drunken voice. “Come and drink.”
“Listen, Dakkil,” pleaded Ken, fight- ing down his revulsion. “Give me the great okal. With that, we can lift the planets out of the Sun—to safety.”
Dakkil Kun shook his heavy head, slowly, so that it lolled alarmingly.
“The planets aren’t yours,” he said thickly. “I sold them to the xyli—for this.”
He gestured clumsily with the em- erald cup, down the long and richly laden table, at the stiff, ghastly-eyed company of gayly clad dead, at the jew- eled tapestries beyond.
“They gave me all that I desired when I was a lonely slave on Pylos,” he said. “And I am content. I will not cheat them.”
“You won't give up the jewel?” asked Ken, in despair.
“If you want it, find it.” He chuck- led thickly. “But you must hasten. It is already growing hot—I must leave you.”
He drained the emerald cup.
Ken leaped forward, seized his heavy shoulder, spun him away from the table of corpses.
“Tell me,” he gasped urgently, “tell a
’ He had meant to demand the okal,
but it was another question that rasped
out: “What became of Wyndonee?” “Find out 2
The mocking whisper was strangled. The heavy body jerked convulsively from his hands and lurched to the table of the dead.
Struggling to subdue his horror and despair, Ken was vainly searching for the great okal behind the gemmed tapes- tries, when the urgent voice of stout little Sin] Mran spoke into the silent room of death:
“We must go, Ken. Lar Radnu sends word that the expanded space shell will endure no longer.”
“No use to go,” muttered Ken hope- lessly, “without the jewel.”
And he kept up his desperate, aim- less search, stifling in air increasingly hot, until Sin! Mran and another dragged him back through the wrecked air-lock.
The doomed hull was released. It fell away from the Victory, into the inferno of the Sun’s heart. While the Victory fought for her life, Ken stood, listless, limp with hopeless despair, watching the wreck. Dwindling as it plunged away, it changed from orange- red to yellow; it became blue-white. It flowed, flattened. A swirl of flaming vapor, it was lost in the golden chasm.
All it contained, even the refractory crystal of okal, Ken knew, was now reduced to elemental atoms. And even those atoms were half stripped of or- bital electrons in the terrific furnace of the Sun.
And Ken’s hopes were lost with the okal, and the hopes of the human race.
VIII.
GLUM, silent despair rode the Vic- tory as she drove back toward doomed Nydron.
Wearily, hopelessly, Ken paced the long control room. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, his face drawn and haggard. His shoulders stooped from the burden of a task that had been too heavy. And he had smiled a little, bit- terly, to see a few gray hairs in his temple.
“T should have drunk the poisoned wine,” he muttered, once.
Yet fits of wild, irrational hope still seized him.
“Without the okal,” once he asked Teddu Len, “there’s no chance?”
“None.” The heartless old scientist shook his lean, gray head. “The thou- sand generations of our science have failed to liberate atomic power without the aid of the okal.”
46 ASTOUNDING STORIES
“It wouldn’t be possible to make one ?”
“No. Experiments in that direction were abandoned after a hundred gen- erations. Okals, you know, are not allo- trope of carbon. We believe they were formed when the planets were given birth, deep in the Sun’s core. Then, under unthinkable pressures and tem- peratures, and in a warped space we could never duplicate in the laboratory, matter burst out of the universe, and was instantly chilled, by expansion, in its new subspace. No, only a new, giant Sun can make an okal.
“Nor is there any thinkable possi- bility that another, large enough, will be discovered. Yours is the only one ever found that would have been of any use.
“A superstitious man,” he mused, “might believe that yours was created for our needs, and then taken away as a punishment for the social injustice that made Dakkil Kun into the inhuman monster that he was.
“Anyhow,” he finished, his old voice low with bitter, despairing finality, “the
okal is gone. And with it, our hope.”
The Victory descended once more be- side the towers of Kothri.
Leaving the ship, Ken was appalled at the havoc a few days had wrought. The sky, once pale, cool silver, was now an eternal dome of pitiless, white flame. The air stung the nostrils with hot dust. The terraces of Kothri, once so green, were sere and black from heat.
Rain had ceased to fall, he learned. Rivers were failing already, lakes shrinking. Dust everywhere, carried on searing winds, blighted woodland and field.
Terrible, upon the people he saw, was the shadow of death. Every face was lined and gaunt. Eyes were inflamed from the frightful glare, skins blistered by the merciless radiation. And every face was hideous with the stamp of doom, twisted with devouring fear, mad
with that ultimate insanity that con- quers when hope is dead.
No planet, he learned, had escaped. Even ringed Synthrar, and colossal, far-distant Bellydron, had reported by ultrawave from their scattered colonies that the skies had turned to white flame, that cataclysm of fire was at hand.
Pain of grief and despair pulsed in Ken’s throat as he returned to the Vic- tory. Tears smarted in his inflamed eyes; his gaunt body was racked with dry, ungovernable sobs.
“Always,” he gasped bitterly to Teddu Len, in the control room, “I have wanted to come to Kothri. Always its slender, white towers and its bright, hanging gardens have been a promise to me. I have seen it every moment, in my mind, and Wyndonee there.
“Dakkil Kun destroyed her. And Kothri now is burned and doomed. Wyndonee and Kothri 43
His lips stiffened, and the agony pul- sating in his throat cut off his speech. He turned silently away from the old man, his lean body jerking with voice- less sobs.
“There is little disorder, yet,” said Teddu Len, presently, speaking with the calm of a scientist. ‘Men are dazed, still. When the reaction comes; civili- zation will be gone in a day.”
Ken listened silently. His sobbing had ceased. His emotion had burned itself out and burned the heart out of him, leaving only a stiff automaton.
“Rioting, pillage, arson,” Teddu Len went on dully; “murder, outrage, sui- cide—madness will pile them on us, be- fore the end. And the end itself will be soon. Life will not be possible in the open air beyond a hundred days, I think. In air-conditioned buildings, a few may live another hundred.
“Still,” he added, “there might be time—if we had the okal. The com- mon task, the common hope, would hold civilization together.”
“T had a search made at the palace,”
ISLANDS OF THE SUN 47
Ken told him, in a dry, listless tone. “After all, we don’t know that he took the jewel aboard with him, though he must have done so. But it was fo use. None of the servants or guards had s¢en the jewel—none had so much as heard of it “
He stopped, quivering, electrified. He gasped, and one arm thrust stiffly out. For a moment he stood rigid, then eager life flowed back into his exhausted frame.
To Lar Radnu, entering the control room, he shouted: “Prepare the Vic- tory for a flight to Pylos, immedi- ately.”
To Teddu Len, he said: with your plans.
“Get off, Set every man and
every machine to work, buildimg your field units. “What ?” “Where——” But Ken, in frantic haste, was al- ready pushing him out of the room. The Victory came down upon Pylos.
I am going after the okal.” gasped the old man.
FOLLOWING the directions of Ken, Lar Radnu dropped it into a lit- tle, sandy glade. He snapped off the dynamic space shell and the great red- dish hull settled heavily, but unharmed, against the surface.
“All my boyhood was spent in these hills,” Ken told him. ‘“Dakkil Kun and I often drove our herds across this very spot. The cavern opens from that lit- tle canyon, below. Let’s go.”
The two hastened from the air-lock into the hot atmosphere of Pylos. Ken’s shoulders were erect now. And the slender young admiral had caught his confidence; his scar-twisted, thin face was alight with courage.
Pylos had changed. Its silver sky had become an inverted bowl of incan- descence; its air was the scorching breath of conflagration; its vegetation was already sere and dead with the win- ter of heat. The hot desolation fell like a crushing hand on Ken’s spirit.
“Folly brought me up here,” he mut- tered gloomily. ‘““What I hoped—could not be.”
Panting and sweating in the dusty heat, eyes smarting from the unending savagery of the glaring sky, they toiled across a little rounded plateau and scrambled down into the narrow crevice of the canyon, where sultry heat was like a searing fluid.
“Once ferns grew here,” gasped Ken. “The heat has destroyed them.” He pointed at the dark slit of an opening. “The cavern they hid.”
Lighting their way with the green- ish rays of hand photon disks, they en- tered the grateful cool of the cave, feet splashing in the diminishing trickle of the stream.
Ken stumbled against the bleached roundness of an animal’s skull.
“We killed the tiger here,” he said. “The chamber of the okal is beyond.”
Stooping to creep through the nar- rowing passage, they came at last into the oval glory of the inner chamber. The green of their photon lights re- verberated in many matchless hues from its crystalline walls. It burned in milk- white opalescence upon the clean sand of the floor, where the spring welled up.
Again, from a cause that he could never explain, Ken felt the puzzling emotion that had overwhelmed him on his first entrance to the cavern—a stimu- lating elation, a sense of intoxicating joy and satisfaction.
For a moment he stood, surrendered to that flood of unidentifiable exaltation, his eyes closed, his breath swift, his heart leaping in his chest. He reached out and caught the firm hand of Lar Radnu, instinctively driven to share that supernal instant.
Then the urgencies of the moment restored his purpose.
“The okal is here,”’ he whispered. “It must be.”
He fell upon his knees, delving in the white. wet sand.
48
“How do you know?” asked Lar Radnu, with a curious softness in his voice.
“Dakkil Kun, so far as I can learn, never showed the okal to any man,” said Ken. “He never spoke of it. He certainly didn’t use it in his rise to power.
“Then there is no reason to think he took it away from Pylos. And, I see now, it would have been unwise of him to take it when he left, perhaps impossible. It is too large to be con- cealed easily. And the company police were always alert for such things.”
His voice grew slow as his mind went back to his task.
“T think he must have hidden the jewel on Pylos. And what spot could be safer than this hidden cavern in which it had rested undisturbed from the dawn of time? Finally, remember his repeated challenge: ‘If you want the okal, find it——’ ”
His words ceased with a breathless, triumphant outcry. His hand had en- countered the smooth round of a hard surface beneath the wet sand—a sur- face which had a thrillingly familiar feel, oddly soaplike, cool.
He bent low and lifted in both joy- ously trembling hands the peerless sphere of the great okal. Its heavy, per- fect globe was larger than his two fists. The contact of his flesh gave birth to splendid flame within it, quivering, pul- sating with polychromatic life.
For a little time the two bent over it, breathless, silent.
Their gaze plumbed its fathomless depths of pellucid wonder; their spir- its were laved in its living tides of pure color. The shafts of its incredible radi-
ance lifted them together to heights of ultimate joy that they had never known.
Then Lar Radnu whispered, softly: “The planets can be saved.”
Ken Darren began to speak, in a low, hesitant tone.
“I am somehow sorry to leave this
ASTOUNDING STORIES
cave,” he said. . “A queer dread-—] can’t say why. I am glad for humanity, because we have the jewel. Yet I think I can never be truly happy.”
“Why not?” asked Lar softly.
“I think I told you once,” said Ken slowly. “Once I saw Wyndonee upon a visigraph screen. I suppose I am a fool—but since that day I have loved her.
“I wanted to go to Kothri, in the hope that I might get a glimpse of her. I never dared to think of more than that, until the day I found the okal. Somehow, that gave me a new courage —it made me dream that Wyndonee might be mine.
“But Dakkil Kun took the jewel from me—the jewel, and Wyndonee.”
His voice fell away into a chasm of black regret. After a little time of si- lence, Lar Radnu began to speak slowly, in a soft, husky tone that was new to Ken.
Radnu,
“KEN DARREN,” he said, “I have come to know you well. For many days there has been a thing I wanted to reveal to you, and could not, because of the hideous pressure of doom.”
“Something,” demanded Ken, eagerly, “something about Wyndonee ?”
Lar Radnu nodded, smiling.
“‘She—she’s still—alive ?”
“She is. She escaped Dakkil Kun.”
“But how?” whispered Ken, his joy half incredulous. “And where is she now ?”
““Wyndonee,” said Lar Radnu, “never liked living at the court in Kothri. Ceremony bored her. She disliked the nobles who made love to her; they were greedy parasites upon society, insincere flatterers, emasculated by soft living.
“Wyndonee wanted to taste life of a different kind, simpler, more useful. She made a plan, and at last brought her father, the Lhundar, to approve it. Skilled persons arranged a disguise for
AST-—3
ISLANDS OF THE SUN
her—a disguise as a man. For a long time she wore it, practicing masculine jintonations of voice, masculine tricks of manner and posture.
“At last, when her masquerade was perfect, she went aboard one of the Lhundar’s geodesic fliers. As a com- mon cadet, at first, she sailed out from Nydron, into the golden flame of the Sun. She liked the new, elemental life that carried her to many planets. She studied the intricate sciences of geo- desic navigation. She rose to be a petty officer, then captain of a flier.
“She had a part in balking the first revolt of Dakkil Kun, and for that part, was made admiral of the fleet. In the second revolt, she aided her father in the hopeless attempt to defend Nydron against the black ships of the xyli, and surrendered with him to Dakkil Kun.
“But Dakkil Kun, never penetrating the disguise, was unable to find Wyndo- nee, though he searched all Nydron. For want of trained men of his own, he left her in command of the fleet— where she aided in the search for her- self. Softly, Lar Radnu laughed.
“And, Ken Darren,” the husky voice concluded, “you know the rest.”
“Wyndonee,” asked Ken, faint with incredulous joy, “became Lar Radnu?”
“She did,” came the whisper.
“You—you are Wyndonee?”
“T am,” assented the admiral.
The low voice had become completely feminine. Its cool huskiness touched an old memory in Ken; it resounded through his heart. And the military stiffness of the slender young officer dissolved into the yielding, gracious curves of womanhood, as Ken’s trem- bling arms were held out.
And the great okal, forgotten, burned in solitary and transcendent splendor upon the smooth sand that floored the oval chamber.
When they left the oval chamber, willingly now, joyously, and hand in hand, but one thing troubled Ken.
AST—4
“The scar?” he asked.
“Oh!”
And his ears rejoiced to the delicious tinkle of Wyndonee’s laugh, a sound he had long yearned for, bitterly, and de- spaired of hearing ever again.
“The scar will peel away,” she prom- ised him. “It is a kind of adhesive film which draws the skin, painted. If you wish to see me without it 4
“T do.”
“Then we must lose Lar Radnu, and you shall bring back to Kothri the lost Wyndonee.”
Sight of the great okal, in Kothri, ushered eager youth back into the weary eyes of Teddu Len.
“It will do?” Ken asked him, anx- iously.
“Tt will!”
And the scientist was an old man no longer. His shoulders were straight ; his face bright, the seams of years wiped from it miraculously.
“Tt is a perfect thing,” he whispered. “It is larger than I had dreamed pos- sible. Its beauty will be the greatest treasure of mankind. To look into it, only, is reward enough for a life of pain.”
“And it will save the planets?” asked Wyndonee,
WYNDONEE, standing beside Ken Darren, was restored now to the beauty
of his dreams. The dark pigment was gone from her radiant skin; the long scar had vanished; the admiral’s trim uniform had been exchanged for a blue, shimmering gown that accentuated every rich curve of her.
The scientist’s reply kindled new ra- diance in the blue of her eyes.
“Tt will, my children. It will. The first field units will be ready within forty days. This peerless jewel will activate copper to supply abundant atomic power. The units will fly like ships to the planets which they are to drive, three to each.
50 ASTOUNDING STORIES
“Within a hundred days, the planets will all be lifted above the photosphere, and the skies will be merciful again.
“A few hundred days more, and they will be driven beyond the critical point, so that no more power will be needed. The tidal thrust of the Sun will send them out, and out, speeding them in their new orbits, so that life—our kind of life—may continue upon them, even after the collapsing etheric spheres are
A solemn elation had come into the fresh youth of his voice.
“For ages beyond all reckoning, Ken my son, the planets will turn about the Sun. And our children, upon them,
will rise to heights of culture and hap- piness beyond our dreams.
“There will be vicissitudes, disasters. Men may lose the power of travel be- “tween the planets, may sink even to
savagery. But all life, we know, car- ries the germ of human intelligence. And the seed of man is now on every planet.
“And if he falls, man will ever rise again.”
His rapt eyes fell to the flaming, liv- ing wonder of the jewel in his hands.
“This great crystal,” he said, “will endure forever. It can hardly be de- stroyed. And men are not likely to lose it—forever. Its beauty will always restore the upward urge, and the won- der of its power will give men the key to advancement.”
He lifted the great, pellucid sphere above his silveted head, where it flamed like an eternal beacon.
Ken and Wyndonee looked for a moment up into its fire, and then turned silently each to the other, entering a nearer, more intimate wonder.
Intra-Planetary
A surprising story by CHAN CORBETT
"ey Y
With a savage roar of vibrations the ranks surged through the white monster.
f YUBO was weary and a bit afraid. This was his fourth journey through the tremendous reaches
of outer space, yet he liked it no more than he had the first. Even in the new space skin he had recently invented and been the first of all his tribe to use, the risks were desperately great. For the vast emptinesses between the worlds of his universe were peopled ‘with strange terrors and unimaginable dangers.
Tubo felt a shudder pervade the semi- torpid roundness of his huddled being as he peered through the pale translu- cency of the enveloping space skin. He was helpless, exposed to the cruel sport- iveness of chance. All the frantic sci- ence of those last feverish moments within the expiring world had been un- able to gain him the secret of motile navigation in space. The strong cur- rents that blew through the universe
52 ASTOUNDING STORIES
swept him about in aimless progression.
All around, in tempting profusion, bathed even as he, in the strange, fierce glow that permeated all space, moved inviting worlds, elongated, breasted the universe currents with erratic, incalcula- ble orbits. How many times had he at- tempted to plot the path of the world he had recently quitted, to bring it within rigid mathematical laws, and failed?
Ah! That last sweep had brought his sheathed, protoplasmic form almost to the very surface of a lovely, heaving planet. He pushed violently with all his uncomplicated fluidity against the hard- ness of the space skin in a vain attempt to hurl himself upon that beckoning surface.
If only he could make contact, attach himself. In seconds he would have bur- rowed into one of the innumerable tun- nels that led from the glow-exposed sur- face into the soft, warm, welcoming darkness of the interior. Life there was luxurious and food was to be had for the gulping.
But alas! A mocking cross-wind of space, a swift, incalculable swerve on the part of the plunging planet, and he was once more buffeted in emptiness. The terrible glow of the universe was beginning to take effect upon Tubo now. It was this inimical radiation that con- stituted the greatest hazard of space travel. It shriveled and seared and burned—even penetrated through the protective sheath in which he was en- folded.
He felt his body growing hard and taut. His delicate senses measured the rate of evaporation. His mind sped with lightning swiftness through intri- cate calculations. He had five minutes more of universe-time before the radia- tions would shrivel him to a lifeless husk. In that period he must effect a landing on a proper planet, or else——
Tubo was a great scientist, the great- est of his tribe—for that matter of all
the tribes that peopled the planets of space. Other tribes had better natural protection than his; they could form space skins at will from the materials of their own bodies. Tubo and his kind had no such powers. All the more honor to him then for inventing and constructing an improvement on their natural covering.
And it had been Tubo who had dis- covered, in the depths of his laboratory, that the world they inhabited was a dy- ing world. He grimaced bitterly to himself even now at the thought.
He had hoped, after three former forced hegiras, that this planet would prove his last resting place. It almost had—but in a different sense. He had been the only one to escape. All the others—those of his own tribe and of the numerous other tribes who inhabited the planets with them—had perished. A wave of resentment coursed over his quiescent, rounded protoplasm.
Tubo had no organs of thought as we know them, no differentiation of func- tions. Thought was a process of the totality of him, so were the other func- tions of life; ingestion of food, evacua- tion of excreta, reproduction, sensory perceptions. There were no male and female in the world of Tubo, nor was there death except by violence or acci- dent. Tubo reproduced by binary fis- sion, a splitting along a longitudinal axis. Tubo was not one, he was a mil- lion different split personalities.
IT WAS all the fault of those other tribes, he thought resentfully. Why didn’t they leave him and his own tribe alone to a planet? Why did they persist in following, in colonizing where they
colonized? Tubo’s tribe ordinarily man-.
aged a peaceful existence.
True, the planet would sometimes cease its aimless, incalculable movements and remain quiescent in space. But that did not matter. Only once had a
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INTRA-PLANETARY 53
world succumbed into the frigidity of death because of them.
In all other cases it had been the fault of the crowding tribes who followed them, who ate and drank voraciously of the life-giving intra-planetary fluids, and exhausted the wealth of natural re- sources within an incredibly short time.
He would never forget the world he had just quitted. Just as he was com- fortably settled, and his laboratory set up according to his satisfaction, he recognized the symptoms of a dying world. He had warned the others ; they fiad not heeded him. He had barely time enough to inclose himself in his space suit, and hurl himself out of the current of the underground river into the swift gaseous exhalations that jerked with spasmodic regularity through the chief outer orifice of the dying world.
He was ejected just in time. A sud-
den swirling upheaval of subterranean gas thrust him violently into space, spin- ning and bobbing. Looking back, Tubo saw the elongated planet ripple all over
its flexible surface; then it was immo- bile. The orifice remained a gaping hole, moveless and still. The subter- ranean explosions had ceased. No gas puffed out. The planet was dead.
Tubo shuddered with the narrowness of his escape. His comrades, friends, all the inhabitants who had lived and jostled with him over a hundred split- ting generations, were doomed to a hor- rible, hopeless death. Imprisoned within the bowels of the dead world, while the heat of subterranean fires ebbed into destroying frigidity.
The broad, warm, life-giving rivers slowly congealed and held their strug- gling forms in a movelessness from which there was no escape, until they strangled and died in dreadful, bursting agonies.
Tubo was no sentimentalist. None of his kind was. He accepted life and death, especially the death of others. But it was striking closer and closer to
himself each time. That last escape was too much by a hair’s breadth for com- fort. He was a scientist. Surely there must be some way. He stopped himself grimly. Time enough for that. Meanwhile he was in peril of immedi- ate dissolution. The glow was beating in upon him, piercing his shrinking body with strange agonies. In another space- minute, he calculated feebly
Ah! A planet swarmed huge upon his vision. It was moving rapidly, rush- ing through the universe in an inscruta- ble orbit. If only A space flow swooped upon him, caught him in its vast force-thrust. It hurled him di- rectly teward the lunging world, directly toward a gaping crater which led into the interior, where food, security and life beckoned to him.
Exultation beat through his rapidly desiccating frame, renewed his energies. Closer, closer, he was hurried, still in the clutch of the blessed current. Now he was at the very mouth of the orifice. It yawned before him with inviting blackness. Panic seized him then— panic and a sense of helpless suffoca- tion. What if he were an instant too soon, an instant too late!
The planets of the universe were all volcanic in nature. At regular intervals the interior fires belched forth a hot effluvia, of gases. An eruption now would send him careening back into outer space, tossing and bobbing. With awful clarity Tubo knew that this was his last chance. If he missed this world, he would die before chance could throw him in the path of another.
A faint eddy crossed the space cur- rent on whose bosom he was being car- ried. It came from the rapidly nearing planet. Nausea drenched his protoplas- mic formlessness. Was it but the premonitory prelude to a _ geysering eruption, or was it A back eddy sucked at him, swept him out of the clutches of illimitable space, pulled him
54 ASTOUNDING STORIES
tumbling and twisting into the maw of a Stygian darkness.
Down, down the unfathomable gulf he dropped, like a plummet, past strange caverns and spongy traps, where lurked weird monsters whose single gulp was death, past them in safety, down, ever down, the wind of his flight whistling through his space skin, until, in a pale phosphorescent glow, he found himself hurtling through a series of hollow cav- erns, whose dark red, spongy walls glis- tened with a dripping dew.
FRANTICALLY he tried to stop himself. This was the ideal place for settlement ; this was a home as good as the one he had just hurriedly quitted. Nowhere else within the recesses of this vast interior world would he find ex- istence so secure, so comfortable.
Furthermore, during the long, terrible space journey, certain ideas had pulsed with gathering force through his being ; plans had matured which he wished to put into effect at once.
Yet the beckoning red walls slipped upward with hopeless speed. In another instant the caverns would end, and he would find himself immersed in the sub- terranean river which would sweep him to remoter and more barren reaches. He bumped! Breathless eternity! Would he tear loose from this last hold, or would the friction between the soft pulp of the cavern wall and the smooth slipperiness of his space skin bring him to a halt? He cursed now the protec- tive covering that had brought him safely through his interplanetary flight. His naked being, viscid and semi-flow- ing, would have perished long before this caught hold.
He quivered, swung aimlessly. The least shudder, and Ah! His swings grew shorter. The spongy wall en- folded him lovingly. He was being em- bedded. He was safe; he was home! He breathed a sigh of thankfulness.
An all-wise, omnipotent Being had
guided him safely, had peopled the frightening depths of space with innu- merable worlds, equipped to the last de- tail with all the necessities for life and continued existence. Not that he hadn’t heard rumors of strange planets that roamed the galactic universe, to all out- ward seeming like these kindly worlds, whose interiors nevertheless harbored strange, poisonous compounds, whose mysterious depths meant instant death, He, Tubo, had been fortunate thus far
He set to work at once. He uncoiled his huddled round form, straightened it to the rodlike length which was his nor- mal shape. He pushed with all his strength against the resilient membrane of the space skin. It gave, punctured. With a gasp of thanksgiving he wrig- gled out, attached himself with a shud- dering ecstasy to the soft, dripping cav- ern wall! It felt good. The red dew sucked into his naked form, swelled him with a satisfying feeling of fruition.
“Hello!” The vibration impacted cn his delicate protoplasm, wriggled him around toward the speaker. He was not alone, naturally. Not a planet in the universe but was tenanted with swarms of beings—members of his own race, members of other races.
The person who had greeted him swung chattily from a nearby wall. He was not of his tribe; he was round and smooth and smaller. “A _ stranger here?” the round one asked in friendly fashion.
“Yes,” Tubo told him. “My old world died. I’ve just come in from space.”
“T know,” the other remarked sympa- thetically. “It’s happened to me, too Just as I get all set and comfortable, something always goes wrong with my planet, and I’ve got to get out in a hurry. I just came here myself a short time ago. Haven’t even had a chance to split up yet. But here, we haven't introduced ourselves. My name’s Strep- ton.”
INTRA-PLANETARY 55
“Mine’s Tubo,” the scientist said. “Now look 4
But a change was taking place in Strepton. The round sphere of him commenced to quiver all over. The clear luminescence of his body clouded. The vibrations increased. Then slowly, at the poles of his being, two tiny in- dentations appeared, sank deeper and deeper until Tubo’s new friend was at- tenuated in the middle like an hourglass.
Tubo never knew what made him jerk his rodlike form convulsively forward just then. Perhaps it was the inordinate keenness to vibration that had set him apart and made him greater than his fellows. But it saved his life.
For the oval white monster who had pounced out of the spongy recess in whieh it had been lurking, missed him by a millimicron. Its huge, voracious bulk slithered on, unable to stop itself, straight for the splitting, reproducing body of Strepton.
Tubo cried out a hoarse warning, knowing even as he did that it was use- less. Those in the throes of parturition were particularly helpless, unable to duck or dodge or squirm to safety.
Already the white mass of the slither- ing monster was arching itself over the hapless Strepton, avid to ingest this toothsome morsel into its slimy depths. _ A last shudder coursed through the fissuring being. There was a rending sound, and Strepton broke literally into two. The white beast gulped. Strepton the Second disappeared with a horri- ble sucking sound. The monster slav- ered and rippled with glutted satisfac- tion, and kept on sliding down the trickle of red dew. In another second he was out of sight and the slobbering sound of his digestion mercifully quenched.
TUBO stared .after him with trem- bling anger. The planets held their per- ils as well as the reaches of outer space. Give him time, a well-equipped labora-
tory, and he would bring certain experi- ments on which he had already em- barked to fruition. Then
The idle, chatty voice of Strepton broke in on his grim resentment. “Al- most had me that time, didn’t he?”
Tubo swung around. “Yes,” he said slowly, “but he got your child.”
Strepton gave a ripplelike shrug. “That’s life,” he said easily. ‘‘Besides,” he added humorously, “give me time and I'll have a thousand more.”
Tubo had no chance to answer, for the inhabitants of his new world came swarming to bid him welcome. They surrounded him, and chattered and squeaked and wriggled—uncounted mil- lions of them. Fellow tribesmen, long and rodlike; round orbs like Strepton, in a thronging profusion of species ; and certain pallid, slinking, corkscrewing creatures from whom the others moved gingerly away. Tubo himself could not suppress a shudder at the sight of one pallid stranger who almost brushed up against him.
“Stinking outlaw!’ he muttered an- grily to himself. There was something gruesomely pale and lusterless about them. Of all the forms of life who peo- pled the universe they alone slunk and squirmed their threadlike forms fur- tively along, shunning the friendly gre- gariousness of the others.
The pallid shape spiralled rapidly near him. “You needn’t make remarks about me,” he squeaked. “Spira has his own tribe waiting for him.” With that he wriggled toward a colony of cork- screw shapes, hanging in a ghastly clus- ter on a neighboring wall.
Tubo frowned, but the clamor of greeting swarmed around and over him. His fame had preceded him. There were those in this world whom he had met inside other planets, and who had seen his work. They murmured awed, broken phrases to the other inhabitants, until, from the farthermost nooks and
56 ASTOUNDING STORIES
crannies of the world, they flocked to see the famous scientist.
Tubo was almost crushed under the clambering throngs of his well-wishers. Like true sightseers they remained, re- fusing to give way to late, hurrying throngs as the news continued to spread. They gulped the thin streams of red fluid dry; they burrowed into the soft red walls and ate and ate and ate to repletion; they paused only to split in a hundred different ways and to thrust their new-born offspring upon the spongy food of the caverns. The din was frightful; the crush unendurable. And all the while the pallid outlaws hung to a single spot, burrowing deeper and deeper with a certain terrible ferocity.
A clamor arose suddenly within the outer pressing ranks—a sound com- pacted of terror. Tubo, half-crushed, dazed under the weight of his well- wishers, knew that sound for what it was. A cold anger burned through him. Fools! Heedless, stupid fools, all of
them! Their silly clamor and crowding and jostling had brought the avenging monsters of the planet upon them. Already he could hear the peculiar, horrible slimy sound with which they
engulfed their prey. Already the screams of the victims smote his quiver- ing form, sent panic waves through the close-pressing hordes of his fellows. They surged blindly in all directions, seeking safety in tiny nooks and cran- nies.
Far off, bearing down upon them with steamy exhalations, was a flooding river. It was hot ; hot with the forced tempera- ture of the distant, interior fires. And on its flowing crest, rearing themselves avidly in glaring expectation, were myri- ads of white oval monsters. So many were they that the normal red-colored river was a pasty white—almost like Spira and his kind.
There was not a moment to be lost. Scattered as they were, the frightened
multitude was an easy prey. The appe- tite of the white beasts was insatiable. They would hunt and harry and gobble until only the most securely hidden would escape. The unnatural warmth of the river that carried them in its bosom lent them added ferocity, while it weakened the delicate protoplasmic tissues of their victims.
IN A FLASH Tubo saw the answer to the problems that had been puzzling him, on which he had worked unavail- ingly before his former world had ex- pired. But first there were other more immediate and pressing things to be done. His very life was at stake. -
His long, slender form vibrated rap- idly. The clear call of his kind rippled outward in a widening wave, impinged on the receptive protoplasm of his fel- lows.
“Stop where you are!” he shouted. “In flight there is death for all of us. We outnumber the enemy a hundred to one. Safety lies only in swift attack. Forward!”
The panicky hordes stopped irreso- lutely, wavered, then caught the con- tagion of his voice. A brave reckless- ness invaded their beings, filled them with strange new, satisfying ardors. Formerly they had always fled from the dread, engulfing monsters, trusting to the multiplying rapidity of their repro- duction for the continuance of the spe- cies, but never had they dared to stand and fight. But now they had found a leader, and it was good.
The multitudes stopped, formed in close, solid ranks. Only the outlaw, pal- lid corkscrews, led by Spira, remained apart. They burrowed more and more rapidly, until they were completely in- closed and out of the noise of battle.
The white-dotted flood roared down upon the tribes. The white beasts reared themselves joyously and fell with slobbering, sucking sounds upon the massed ranks. Here was food in abun-
INTRA-PLANETARY 57
dance, such as they had never seen be- fore. Fear was not in their bodies; they had no organs for such neuroses.
But Tubo was already threading the phalanxes of the tribes with strong, whipping movements. “Forward!” he shouted and swam boldly into the swarming flood. Behind him grew a mighty yell, as the tribes, inflamed by the sight of their leader, hurled them- selves after him.
The battle was on!
The enemy reared and swept into their slimy folds thousands of the strug- gling tribesmen. Screaming beings struggled hopelessly inside their fear- some maws and dissolved into fluid ex- tinction before the horrified gaze of their fellows. The slaughter was ter- rific!
For a moment the ranks wavered. There was no fighting these terrible creatures. Then Tubo’s voice rose strong and clear again. “Smother them with your numbers! It is your only chance !”
With a savage roar-of vibrations they smashed forward. A hundred clung to each thrashing beast. Five, ten, fifteen, were swept with hideous screamings into the fatal bodies, but others took their places. The white monsters twisted and writhed and engulfed with sucking movements. But the tribesmen clung to their enemies with the tenacity of leeches. Slower and slower grew the thrashings, the convulsive jerkings, un- til, with a final shudder, the dread things lay limp and silent underneath their swarming weight.
The terrible planetary monsters had been defeated. For the first time in the history of the universe they had suc- cumbed to a direct onslaught. The few remaining of the horde broke ranks, and swam hastily back against the untainted tedness of the underground river, seek- ing their lairs in the caverns of the chalk-white cliffs, to lick their wounds
and gain recruits from the ever-spawn- ing rock.
The tribes went wild with joy. Un- counted thousands had died in the tre- mendous conflict. But that did not mat- ter. The dead were dead, and those alive could now split and split to their heart’s content, bearing innumerable progeny into this habitation that was now almost miraculously freed of the lurking menace. In an _ unbelievably short time they would swarm in such reckless profusion as no planet had ever witnessed before.
But Tubo was not exulting. A frowning quiver passed over his naked being. Strepton, pulsing rapidly with the strain of his recent exertions, and the near approach of a new parturition, asked anxiously: “Have you been hurt, Tubo?”
The scientist wriggled a negative. “It is not that. But have you felt, Strep- ton, how cold it is becoming?”
Strepton shivered suddenly. “B-rrr! Yes! I hadn’t noticed it before. It was so hot only a moment ago.”
“Exactly. The interior fires have cooled. The white monsters stirred them to fever heat to overcome us. When that failed, the fires somehow quenched. Strepton,” he went on im- pressively, “our planet is dying.”
The little round fellow rolled over with fright. “Impossible!” he wailed. “T just got here. I couldn’t make an- other space journey now. I’d die. I’d be——”
BUT Tubo was not listening to his complaints. He was thinking, thinking as hard and as fast as he had ever done in all his life. He, too, would not so soon be able to withstand the perils and strains of the inimical universe outside. It was definitely colder now.
The joyous multitudes had felt it, too. Binary fissions remained unfin- ished, as life processes slowed. The delicate protoplasm af their bodies quiv-
58 ASTOUNDING STORIES
ered and jelled. Motility became a diffi- cult, painful process. Anguish quivered on all their straining forms. Even the most stupid knew that the planet had abruptly slowed its forward motion, that somehow it had become motionless, qui- escent, fixed in space. The planet was dying, and they
Tubo saw everything. The red sponginess of the caverns, ordinarily a strong, regular expansion and contrac- tion, subject to definite, calculable laws, now fluttered irregularly. The vibra- tions were slowing, becoming feebler. The red dew on which they fed was a trickle where it had been a flood, and a new stream burst out of the walls— thick, viscid, yellow, slimy. A poison- ous exudation whose appearance was a ghastly horror.
The scientist wriggled sharply. “I have it, Strepton,” he cried in high ex- citement.
“What ?” asked his friend stupidly.
“The solution to our troubles. We've been fools all our lives—all the lives of the uncounted generations before us. We are greedy. A world, the universe itself, was a thing to be exploited as rapidly as possible, to be sucked dry of all its natural resources. We had ene- mies, it is true—the fierce white mon- sters. They ate us and gobbled us and held us down. We had only one weapon against them, that is, up till now. Our fecundity !
“We overwhelmed them by sheer pro- creation. If we split into new person- alities faster than they could seek us out and destroy us, we exulted. We had been victorious. Blind fools that we were! Thereby we destroyed ourselves. Strepton, the white monsters were not our enemies; they were our best friends!”
The translucence of Strepton’s round- ness clouded. “Have you gone mad?” he exclaimed angrily. “If the others should hear you-——”
“They shall!” Tubo cried. His sur- face was luminous with rapid thought. “I’ve found the secret. Listen, all of you,” he raised his voice.
The moaning died. The tight-packed multitudes, stiff with approaching dis- solution, looked fearfully toward the rodlike scientist.
Tubo was their leader. He had de- feated the unconquerable planetary beasts. Perhaps he could do something now. It was terribly cold. The hot in- mer core of the world seemed to have quenched. The slow pulsations of the cavern walls were the merest quiver now. They were trapped in an expir- ing world.
“T have discovered the secret,” Tubo shouted, “the scientific secret of the uni- verse. It is balance! Our fortunes, our very lives, are inextricably bound up with the planets we inhabit. As long as we are sensible and moderate, the worlds of space maintain their inner fires, the red rivers flow with nutriment, the cavern walls provide us food and comfortable shelter. But once we be- come greedy and tear recklessly at the profusion of their natural resources, once we blindly and without thought spawn innumerable progeny, what hap- pens? The planets cool, they expire, and we in our folly with them.”
He paused, and looked over the stilled, breathless multitudes. “TI hesitate to say this—it is only an analogy, you under- stand—but it is almost as though the senseless worlds of the universe, with their volcanic inner fires and regular eruptions, their caverns and swift flow- ing rivers, have a strange, formless, mineral life of their own. They can bear so much of us and no more. Crowd them to recklessness and they die of our profusion, even as we .
A snicker interrupted him. As one the taut tribesmen turned to the sound of the scoffer. It was Spira, thrusting his pallid corkscrew shape out of the
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INTRA-PLANETARY 59
wall in which he had been comfortably embedded.
“Ho! Ho!” he snorted. “A philoso- pher, a spinner of moonshine. The next thing he’ll be telling us that we’re just parasites on the bodies of these mythical planet creatures of his—that their life is more important to the universe than ours.”
“You shut up, Spira,” Tubo cried, outraged, “and don’t put your own sacri- legious thoughts in my mouth.” He reared his rodlike body proudly.
“We tribesmen are the ultimate crea- tions of the universe. We are the own- ers and inheritors thereof. The planets were formed by an all-wise Being for our maintenance and enjoyment. We possess the power of thought; we are the finest flower of existence. It is silly to think that evolution could have produced anything superior to us.
“TI told you it was merely a tentative analogy; that the planets might—ab- stractly, you understand—possess a
modicum of queer mineral existence of
their own. But our time is getting short; it is getting colder and colder. Just now we have upset the balance of things, more definitely than ever before. We defeated the white beasts. We have crowded and spawned in tremendous profusion. As a result the planet has become a dying world.”
“What’s the answer then?” Strep- ton queried.
Tubo took a deep breath. “This! An end to our reckless, wasteful meth- ods. An end to the rapid destruction of natural resources. A reéstablishment of certain checks and balances which we destroyed by defeating the planetary monsters. They evidently had their niche in the scheme of things. They seemed our most deadly enemies; they killed, it is true, individuals of us, but by keeping our numbers in bounds they unwittingly maintained the delicate bal- ance of nature, and in the larger sense, were our benefactors.”
A LOW GROWL went up from his auditors. From time immemorial they had known the terrible beasts as the ogres of their existence, and now this Tubo came along and hailed them as brothers. It was ridiculous; more, it was
“TI suppose,” squeaked Spira sarcasti- cally, “we'll send our new friends a let- ter of invitation to come and munch on us. And apologies, too, for having dared assault their mightinesses.”
Tubo checked the rising ripple of laughter with a blaze of quivering lumi- nescence. “You won’t have to apolo- gize, Spira,” he said pointedly. “While the other tribes were fighting and dy- ing, you and your cowardly kind were safe ensconced in your hide-out.” The pallid one wilted under the roar of ac- quiescence. With scared celerity, he burrowed back into the walls.
The scientist went on. “We must act, and at once. It may be too late even now. Don’t worry about the planetary monsters. They fit somehow into the scheme of things, and we must let them live unharmed. But I don’t intend permitting them to prey on us as of old. In the laboratory on my former world I evolved a defense against their depredations—a fluid which I can manu- facture in huge quantities from the min- erals of this planet. We'll pour it into the rivers and thus spread it to every corner of the world. It does not kill the beasts, but it renders them harm- less; deprives them of their strength.”
“But if you remove what you have called a salutary check upon us’’—Strep- ton wrinkled his roundness in expostu- lation—"‘it will only make things worse.”
“Not at all,’ Tubo answered calmly. “TI am proposing a planned economy, a conservation of our natural resources, an expert balancing of forces—birth control, a new deal!”
“A new deal!” The phrase whispered from one to the other, grew from a whisper to a murmur, from a murmur
60
to a torrential roar. It had such a satis- fying, mouth-filling sound; it meant all things to all tribesmen; it held a con- tent of vague, large promises that were difficult to pin down, and therefore all the more glamorous. Besides, the cold was creeping into their very vitals. The world was definitely dying, and only a fortunate few of all their number would be able to escape into the soul-searing reaches of outer space. Fewer still would find a new world in time. They had nothing to lose.
So it was that with hardly a dissent- ing vote the plan was adopted and Tubo acclaimed as the first dictator and co- ordinator. Spira and his brethren re- mained cannily out of sigiit.
Tubo organized things at once. Time was precious. He appointed Strepton his lieutenant. The tribes were counted and separated into companies. Each was given a definite task. The cold was creeping up on them, slowing their movements, freezing their delicate bod- ies. The planet had been fixed in one spot in space for an unconscionably long time. The volcanic explosions were barely perceptible.
But only to Strepton would Tubo con- fide his fears. To the others he was a driving dynamo of energy, a fount of radiating enthusiasm. He infected them with his vigor. In double-quick time a laboratory was set up, and a corps of willing, though inexpert assistants placed at his disposal. The chemical fluid was soon being manufactured in large quantities, and dumped into the languidly flowing rivers.
The next step was to put a stop to all procreation for a fixed period of time. Tubo worked feverishly at the problem. Finally it was solved. He found that the involuntary urge to binary fission was a function of the saline content of the rivers and of the amount of food ingested per unit of time.
ASTOUNDING STORIES
The second half of the problem was easily attended to. Food was rationed out in scientifically calculated portions. But the first was not so easy. It was only after herculean labors that Tubo evolved an -apparatus which extracted the reproduction-accelerating salt from the mighty rivers in sufficient quantities.
Then there was the task of getting rid of the glittering stores of crystals. Tubo finally solved this seemingly in- superable problem by eliminating them through the numerous fissures and tiny tunnels that led to the outer surface of the planet. There it was left in huge, caked mountains.
The third step was to scatter the tribes to assigned habitations in the planet. Tubo had noted that whenever they swarmed in huge throngs as they did now, it played havoc with the secret internal economy of the world. Ac- cordingly he had scouts map the entire interior of the world, bring him careful estimates of resources, mineral deposits. growths of food, navigable waterways, climate, ease of communication, etc.
Then, with this data on hand, and a knowledge of the peculiar requirements of each tribe and its characteristics, he was able to assign it to a suitable ter- ritory. Here he ran into difficulties. For individual equations were involved. There were murmurs of autocracy, pro- tests against particular assignments, cries of favoritism.
But Tubo crackled out his orders, un- bending, harsh with strain. In the end he won. For the cold was a bitter ally. Already some of the weaker and more delicately nurtured had succumbed. Blind obedience was their last chance of survival.
THEN Tubo called for volunteers from these tribes who could at will pro- duce membranous space suits. Volun- teers to wriggle their way to the surface of the dying planet, to cast themselves
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into the destructive radiations of outer space, and attempt their tortuous way to the other worlds of