Fletcher Pratt Page 6

  I have no very clear memory of how many trips I accomplished up the path beaten in the snow under the silent stars. My weariness had left me and I was febrile with excitement. It was like a dream; the shack, the toil up the path among the clutching branches, and Ashembe at the end, meeting me in the moonlike radiance that flowed from the interior of the car and carrying things back in with swift movements, like an efficient machine.

  It had to end sometime, of course. As I came down the path on one of my return trips to the shack, I heard the crunch of feet in the snow, and saw the glow of a flashlight snapped on and heard voices.

  "Nobody here," said someone. "Try around the back, Ed."

  I stopped, listening.

  "Here's a path," called a voice. "Maybe they've gone this way. They haven't gone long. The lights still are on." Abruptly the flashlight ran up the path toward me, and I moved quickly enough. The light caught my arm for a second, held it, and then switched it full into my face. A yell.

  "Stop! Hands up! This way, Jerry, I see him!"

  I turned toward the car, running. "Stop!" "Where is he?" I heard behind. Then, past my head there was the vicious wheen of a bullet, and the pistol report sounded like a cannon.

  The door of the car was right ahead, with Ashembe's bent form outlined against the interior light. Without even thinking, I dived for it; there was another report as I dived and a bullet smacked against the steely side of the car. I was inside, striking my knee a savage blow as I went through the low opening. Footsteps sounded behind me, more shouts and a clang of metal as Ashembe lifted the door to slide it into place. I writhed to hands and knees, turned and saw that someone had gripped' the door from outside and was trying to keep Ashembe from closing it, but even as I reached out to help him, my visitor let go his hold, fumbled at his belt and produced the destructive flash.

  "No!" I cried, but too late. The beam of intense violet radiance leaped from the screen, striking the bent figure on the outside fairly in the middle. I heard a low "Augh!" of agony and the figure collapsed in the snow as the door slid into place with a clang.

  Without even a glance at me, Ashembe produced the welding flash and began to weld the edges of the door indissolubly into place. The realization that I was a prisoner in the cometary car and an accessory to a murder, suddenly struck me, and all at once I felt the accumulated muscular and nervous fatigue of the day. A whirling universe of sparks danced before my eyes, and I lost consciousness.

  V

  My FIRST sensation was one of extreme annoyance that it should be morning before I had half the sleep I wanted. Dreamily I turned over to gather the covers about me for that last delightful five minutes of doze before clambering out into a cold world. My hands met neither blanket nor sheet and, startled into consciousness, I looked up to see above me not the beams of the shack but the tapering, tan-colored interior of the Shoraru, lined with its rows of racks and apparatus. Then I remembered.

  I sat up with difficulty. I was in the central chamber of the car, on the floor, and beside me was Ashembe, locking tight the joints of the interior door and closing the cracks with atotta. A dull tapping sound, like the racket of a distant woodpecker, filled the place.

  "Hello!" I remarked rather fatuously. (I could think of nothing else to say.)

  "You are revivified," he said, turning from his task with a smile. "I am happy. You do not objection to journeying with me? I can return you here after a trip to your interior planets."

  I became aware of the pain in my knee, and memory rushed in upon me. "Why, yes," I said, rubbing the injured member. "There's nothing else for me to do. I'm afraid you killed that policeman, and they'd probably hang me if I went back now."

  "Hang you? Oh, you signify execution. But you did not do it."

  "I know," I said. "But I was present. That makes me an accessory or something. What's that noise?"

  "Your police anxious to enter herein. However, no matter. We depart upon the instant."

  I realized that the police were trying to batter down the outer door of the car—that massive steel and iridium door. Ashembe turned to the control keys of the car. Then— "But won't the explosion when you start injure some of them?" I asked.

  He looked up in perfectly genuine surprise. "Certainly," he said. "But no matter of that. They would do us harm." And this extraordinary individual, who would not give us information, unless we promised to altruistically surrender it to the whole world, calmly turned the keys that would very likely blow half a dozen men to bits.

  Nothing happened. The hammering on the distant periphery of the car did not even stop. There was only a gentle hissing. It rose to a rattle, and then, just as I was about to speak, a tremendous explosion burst that sent me caroming off the side wall of the chamber to the floor of the car. We were off.

  After that first burst of sound, however, there was neither noise nor perceptible motion. I raised myself somewhat cautiously to my hands and knees, then to my feet, and looked around. Everything in the car was the same as before; the soft daylight radiance from Ashembe's quartz flooded the interior of the narrow chamber; the various pieces of apparatus and metal cylinders of liquefied gases stood firmly in their racks. Below them others held materials that remained in the cases sent from New York, removed to the car in that state during our last hasty moments of flight.

  Ashembe had seated himself cross-legged on the floor and was gazing intently into the workings of one of his mercury motors, which apparently had something wrong with it. Everything was perfectly serene, almost monotonously so, as though instead of sitting in a cometary car bound across those vast wildernesses of space, which even light takes centuries to cross, we might have been back in the shack. In the shack, but for the shape of the room and —a thought struck me suddenly.

  "Why, how can you tell where we're going?" I asked. "There aren't any windows."

  Ashembe smiled up at me. "Gramercy," he said. "I forget you are a novice. Perceive." He fumbled a minute with keys, making adjustments. A little ring-shaped heater around the hole at the center of the base of the car, the one he had windowed with nickel, sprang into activity. There was a snap as though a shutter somewhere had slid back, and simultaneously one of the mercury tubes, placed above and to one side of the nickel plate, began to play a stream of radiance upon it.

  Under the impact of the ray, the gleaming metal lost its lustre, turned to a bluish, milky plate, became translucent and then transparent. It was as though it had been slid aside and one could see right through the space to the background of the black heavens picked out with the blazing points of stars. I gave a cry of surprise.

  "Simple," said Ashembe in answer to my unspoken query. "The other side of the nickel has been sensitized— like the thing your scientists call the 'photo-glow' tube. It responds perfectly to all change in intensity of light thrown on it. Such changes are transmitted through reflection of the tube within which throws them on nickel plate on inside. Much like periscope in your submarine ships. You comprehend?"

  I didn't. "Why not use glass?"

  "Glass transmits harmful emanations. While in atmosphere of planet, said atmosphere is sufficient insulation against emanatory radiation which are dangerous to life. Glass is not opaque to them, but properly treated metals are. Also there is question of heat. We would be overwarmed by the effect of your sun if glass were used, since we have no atmospheric insulation. Ah, you are enchanted by the vista."

  I was; it was the most magnificent panorama ever beheld by the eye of man. I saw it as though through an enormous porthole. (My conjecture that the nickel plate was lens-shaped for a wider field of vision was later confirmed by Ashembe.) *

  * He apparently means a fish-eye lens. Schierstedt's lack of scientific knowledge throughout obscures details that might be both interesting and useful. In this same paragraph he speaks of "single electrons or ions," which, of course, are not at all the same thing; neither does the casting of single electrons or ions fit in with any rational theory of the source of power o
f the car.

  Around the edge of the circular opening, on every side a dancing trail of sparks flashed off and were extinguished in the velvet black of interstellar space—a trail of fire from our car. (And here again I must insert a parenthetical remark at the risk of irritating the reader. These were not, as I originally imagined, blazing sparks; since there was no atmosphere there could, of course, he no combustion. They were rather in the nature of single electrons or ions, cast off by the fierce electrochemical reaction going on within our motors and glowing with a light of their own.)

  Within this circle of sparks the stars stood out bright and clear on the background of black, shining not with the twinkling light they have as seen from Earth, but with a steady, strong radiance, like distant lamps. At the upper part of the circle was one redder than the rest, larger and dimmer—perceptibly a disc. I took this to be Mars. The moon was nowhere visible, but Earth filled the whole lower half of the picture, and it was the most glorious celestial object I have ever seen.

  It was half shrouded in dark, but even the dark part was visible by the blotting out of the innumerable stars against which it stood, and it was ringed nearly round with a radiant ring where the sun, below and on one side, was reflected back from the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

  The line where the western coast of North America dipped under the Pacific was still illumined and the continent's edge was visible against the shimmering blue of the ocean as a yellowish-green mass. Further down, around the line of the equator, a white ring of clouds shrouded the masses of land and water, and right in the center of the Pacific was a huge, dazzling spot of pure gold—the reflection of the sun, sent back from the water as from a mirror.

  I felt the rub of Ashembe's shoulder against my own. Like me, he was contemplating the view spread before us with rapt attention. "Wonderful, isn't it?" I said.

  "Yes," he replied shortly. "We move very slow at present. Your world still has predominating gravitational attraction. If too much speed is made at the present moment, said gravitational attraction would cause serious injury by crushing. But we escape. You do not feel less weighty?" As he mentioned it, I became more fully conscious of what had been, as it were, poised in the back of my head—a minor irritation. I felt curiously, as he put it, "less weighty." I stood up, and the muscular effort carried me right off my feet, a couple of inches off the floor of the space ship, and I floated gently back as though on wings. It was a singular and not altogether agreeable sensation; a feeling of disembodiment, such as one experiences in those horrible nightmares during which one drifts for hours just above the floor, pursued by some avenging shape. I shuddered a trifle—and the motion propelled me several inches across the car. Ashembe laughed.

  "This is nothing. Wait for the moment when we shall arrive beyond the attraction of your sun."

  No wonder he had been haggard and racked when he rose out of the waters of Sunderland Lake from the wreck of his first car....

  Ashembe watched Earth fading away behind us for a few minutes, made some adjustments here and there, pulled himself upwards to the peak of the projectile along the racks. There he turned on the tubes that enabled him to look out through the nickel plates at that point and after a few minutes of observation returned, coming head downward along the racks like a monkey to the floor of the car again. I watched him as he turned off two of the circle of motors at the base and swung the keys of those on the opposite side to their full power, hardly daring to trust myself to motion, fearful of what I would do with my new-found strength in that constricted space.

  "I am causing a change in direction," explained my fellow voyager. "We do now escape from predominating attraction of your Earth and must change course toward Venus. These motors no longer necessary for progress on so short journey, but we must turn course."

  "Why aren't the motors necessary?"

  "Absurd not to understand. You are badly taught in schools. We are now free body floating in vacuum, except for small amount of dust, solely under attraction of your sun, except for minor attraction from planets. Consequently, having momentum, we are minor planet of the same and would circulate around it in orbit with amount of speed required on leaving limit of Earthly attraction. Such orbit would not bring us to Venus. Consequently, having been unable to leave your Earth at moment which would bring our course to intersect that planet, we must change direction."

  "Why not just turn off all motors but the one on the opposite side from the direction you want to go? Wouldn't it save fuel?"

  "Because if I do this, it would give us rotation only and we spin forever around your sun as a minor planet." A shadow crossed his face. "Such was the unhappy case of early explorers from Murashema. Three or four of them now circle forever around our sun. So I merely turn off the motor at one side and then turn those opposite to full power, giving our motion moments in more than one direction and thereby swinging our course in wide hyperbola. You comprehend?"

  For a marvel, I did. "How long before we will arrive?"

  I asked.

  From one of his pockets he produced a small calculating machine. "Venus is now approaching inferior conjunction." he said, sliding the parts back and forth. "Due to eccentricity of orbit and fact, we are projected from Earth at point on opposite side from Venus we must go on long hyperbola to get to this planet...." He calculated for a moment. "Distance to be covered totals about 20,000,000 miles in your measure. We cannot go much faster than average speed of forty miles per second or a little more than the speed of your Mercury planet. To go faster would not allow us to slow down on approaching Venus, and we would shoot past into your sun, ending in flaming smoke...." Again a calculation. "About one hundred and thirty-six hours from departure to arrival."

  A hundred and thirty-six hours. I pulled my watch out, but being still unfamiliar with the curious effects of the lack of gravity in our exceedingly small planet, tossed it clear over my head, where it bounced gently off a cylinder of liquid hydrogen and returned with the deliberate motion of objects in the slow movies. Ashembe snickered. When I seized it again, it showed half-past eleven by the time of the spot we have left. We had already been gone some three hours and had about five and a half days more to travel before making a landing.

  One altogether loses the sense of time, I found, in a place where it is perpetual day, where the warmth is even and the surroundings unendingly the same. On the third day of our journey I forgot to wind my watch, and it was not until sometime later—not, indeed, till we left Venus— that I set it going again. When either of us felt like it, we retired to one of the outer chambers, from which the light had been removed, and slept. Again, when we felt like it, we helped ourselves to food from Ashembe's store, though there was very little eaten. The sense of hunger seemed to have been left behind with the earth.

  At first I helped Ashembe a little. He had left before his preparations were fairly complete, and there was still some apparatus to be built. He fitted up one of the shells next to the interior chamber as a workshop. There he spent long hours cutting and grinding, working with welding tool and mercury tube to his heart's content. But I early tired of watching operations of whose method and purpose I had no understanding and at which I could be but of small assistance.

  In one of the cases which we had tumbled aboard at the last moment I found a few books, but they turned out to be useless, technical things—differential calculus, metallurgy and astronomy—and however deep my boredom, it did not reach the level of reading abstruse volumes on subjects of which I understood nothing.

  It was on the second or third day out, I think, that I discovered the deck of cards. They kept me busy for as much as forty-eight hours playing endless games of solitaire and trying to work out the probabilities of the game coming out correctly or of a certain card turning up from past performances. But I soon found that the cards responded to no discoverable laws in their permutations.

  Only a limited amount of time could be spent in looking through the nickel screen at the landscape (o
r should I say space-scape?); it had a depressing sameness once the marvel of the first glance had worn off. Altogether I found time hanging so heavily on my hands that I wondered all voyagers from planet to planet did not go raving mad before arriving. It was just as I had taken up a last desperate attempt to give mind and body something to do (by setting down the words of all the poems I knew and counting up the letters to see which appeared oftenest—to such depths of inanity does boredom reduce even comparatively intelligent persons!) that Ashembe, returning from a trip to the observation screens in the central chamber, announced the near approach of our destination.

  I followed him back through the low doors, which had to be entered belly-wise, waiting while he tightened each behind us.*

  * Schierstedt mentions above that just before leaving the Earth the door of the inner chamber was tightened and the crack caulked with atotta. Evidently this had been removed. Possibly it was a temporary arrangement, while passing through the atmosphere, or he may have been mistaken.

  Within the interior chamber the tube and heater around the nickel plates at the peak of the projectile were turned on, and through them the orb of Venus could be clearly seen—now about the same size to the sight as Earth when we had left it. We seemed to be drifting slowly sidewise down toward it, an effect attributable to the fact that the observation screen was not right at the point of the car. I have seen the same effect as I stood at the bow of a ship pulling in to a dock; it seems as though her course is altogether wrong and will take her clear past, until you hear the grinding of her plates against the piles.