Project Gutenberg's The Metal Moon, by Everett C. Smith and R.F. Starzl
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Title: The Metal Moon
Author: Everett C. Smith
R.F. Starzl
Release Date: October 17, 2012 [EBook #41084]
Language: English
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The Metal Moon
By EVERETT C. SMITH and R. F. STARZL
Based upon the Fourth Prize ($10.00) winning plot of the
Interplanetary Plot Contest won by Everett C. Smith, 116 East St.,
Lawrence, Mass
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Wonder Stories
Quarterly Winter 1932. Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration: The ship was now coming close to the vast curve of the
crystal city. The earthmen became aware that the part below the city
level was a dull ugly black.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: EVERETT C. SMITH]
[Illustration: R. F. STARZL]
In this story, the joint product of two imaginative minds, we get a
very unusual picture of some of the possibilities of interplanetary
exploration.
We know that as soon as interplanetary travel is possible,
expeditions from the earth will be ranging the length and breadth of
the solar system searching out the thousands of wonders that are to
be discovered.
It is quite possible that some of the explorers, whether through
accident or desire, may colonize the other planets and develop under
new and unusual conditions a new branch of the human race. It is
doubtlessly true that if each of the solar planets were to be
colonized, at the end of several hundred centuries there would be
nine races of human beings who might differ radically from each
other and in fact might not recognize each other as members of the
same human stock.
In this story we do not see nine races but we do see four of them
and Mr. Starzl has united the four in a gripping narrative of the
great spaces.
THE METAL MOON
The three men in the tiny space ship showed their apprehension as they
watched the gravity meters. Something was distinctly wrong with the
ship.
"Are you sure that there isn't some undiscovered moon of Jupiter?" asked
the youngest of them. He was only about 25, which was very young indeed
when his scientific attainments were considered, even for the human
race's stage of intellectual development in 1,000,144 A. D. His figure
was stocky, powerful, his face rather thin, bold, with piercing black
eyes. He was naked, save for short, brilliantly red trunks of metalsilk.
His name, "Sine," followed by a numerical identification code, was
tattooed indelibly in thin, sharp characters on his broad, bronze-hard
chest.
The man at the ampliscope removed his head from the eyepiece and shook
his head impatiently. His body was bronzed and spare, but the complete
absence of hair on his head made him look older than the 48 years
indicated by the code following the name on his chest, "Kass."
"I tell you, Sine, this pull is no gravity effect. No body of such mass
could be invisible, unless it were composed entirely of protons. And
even then it would yank Jupiter out of shape, making it look like a
pear, but there--"
Jupiter presented its usual appearance. The solar system's largest
planet seemed enormous at this distance of only a few million miles. It
showed its usual marked depression at the poles, but no distortion such
as might be caused by a nearby body of enormous mass.
"What do you think, Lents?" Kass turned to the third occupant of the
little space ship. Lents raised his broad placid face from the pad upon
which he had been figuring a complicated equation. He was a large man,
slow-moving, and fat. He was sensitive to that fact, so that, besides
the usual trunks, he also wore a toga-like garment. His brown eyes
blinked in folds of flesh.
"No doubt you're right, Kass," Lents rumbled in a deep voice. "I can't
see how such a body could exist without pulling all of Jupiter's moons
to itself. No, we seem to be specially honored by its attention."
They looked at one another soberly.
"The question is, can it out-pull us?" Sine remarked.
"You ought to know," Kass said. "You designed and built her."
Sine made his way forward. It was no longer necessary to use the
handholds, for the pull of the mysterious body was already so powerful
that it entirely eliminated the free floating so familiar to space
travelers. Sine looked through the grated outlook windows, past the
gracefully curved bow of the ship. At the very tip was the ether screw
of his invention, resembling the screws used for water propulsion in
ancient times, except that the pitch was extremely sharp. The tachometer
showed that the screw had slowed down to 50,000 revolutions a minute,
although the thermometer indicated that the molecular bearings were
still reasonably cool. But how long could she stand the strain? How
long, indeed, could the sturdy little atomic motor keep those blades
turning? It was designed to pull directly away at a distance of only a
million miles from the sun, and yet it was being beaten far out here in
space by an object as yet invisible.
"What a crash that'll be!" Sine murmured, watching the agony of tortured
metal.
Amidship, Kass was again studying the eyepiece of the ampliscope.
Suddenly he stiffened.
"I see it! Why, it can't be over a couple of hundred feet in diameter.
Cylindrical, I think. Head on to us now."
They crowded around him. Lents, with hasty computations, determined that
they were still about three thousand miles from the object.
"No chance to pull away from it, if we pull straight," and his heavy
voice was full of energy as his sleepiness vanished with the need for
action. "Set her over, Sine, about 40 degrees. Try for a circular orbit
around it--if we can get up enough speed centrifugal force will save
us!"
Sine did as he was told, and the ship heeled over so that it presented
its side to the sinister object, which was still invisible to the
unassisted eye. While Kass watched it through the ampliscope, his
companions stared through the thick ports at the velvet, gem-studded
firmament. They could feel the attraction growing with terrifying speed.
"It's turning with us," Kass announced, "and getting closer. If we can
swing around it, it will be a very sharp ellipse indeed!"
"Try and see if you can get a few more revs out of the screw," Lents
suggested, and Sine crept forward, his powerful muscles straining
against the pull. He lifted the leaden weight of his arm to the lever.
He _must_ get a little more power out of the motor, or they would crash
to their deaths in a few minutes! A fine ending for their daring dash to
Jupiter--the first space flight since the great comet swarm of 800,768
A. D.
Sine pulled back hard on the lever, and the motor gamely responded,
moaned and shuddered under the tremendous overload. The tachometer
needle quivered, began to climb, 52,000, 55,000, 56,000----
The ship gave a lurch--there was a dull grinding, a hollow, metallic
groan. The men picked themselves up from the floor--realizing at once
the fatal significance of the lack of effort required. Their movement
carried them off the floor--made them grasp handholds. Floating free!
That meant falling free!
Sine glanced at the tachometer. The dead needle stood at zero. Through
the forward window he could see one of the four screw blades, black,
motionless.
Lents, obeying the habits of a lifetime, elbow hooked in a handhold, was
figuring the time required for them to strike. He looked up with a
puzzled frown.
"We should have struck about right now! Check on that body's position,
will you, Kass?"
* * * * *
The bald-headed scientist pulled himself to the ampliscope. But it was
possible to see the object through the ports now, quite plainly. It was
black, cylindrical, glinting dully in the sun's light. The space ship
was tumbling end over end, lazily, bringing the thing into view first at
one port--then another.
"No acceleration!" Kass reported, amazement mingling with hope. "Same
speed--we may still hit--but no evidence of gravity. We're falling
toward it on momentum alone!"
Lents' brown eyes twinkled with perplexity in their pits of fat.
"The force, whatever it is, doesn't seem like anything in nature. But if
we're traveling on momentum alone we can pull away with our emergency
rockets--though I hate to waste the fuel."
Sine leaped to the rocket controls. "Grab handholds!" he snapped over
his shoulder. The men rolled into the padded niches provided for that
purpose. Sine's niche was so placed that it would not be necessary to
lift a hand against the tremendous pressure of rocket acceleration. A
lateral swing of the lever along its quadrant operated the rockets.
"Oof!" came a smothered exclamation from Lents as the ship seemed to
pause, to leap forward in space again. The star-studded heavens as seen
through the ports were hidden by a curtain of flame, electric blue and
as stiff seeming as a steel bar--the trail of the forward rockets.
For some minutes there was no sound save the subdued thunder of the hull
as it trembled under the tug of the rockets. Then a light flashed redly
and a gong sounded. The signal that meant, "fuel half gone." Sine shut
off the power, crawled out stiffly. His first glance out of a port
showed that they were still falling toward the mysterious cylindrical
space wanderer.
Kass wiped the sweat from his bald head.
"No use wasting any more effort," he said hoarsely. "That thing is a
space ship, and there are men in it. The force they have been using on
us is some kind of gravity beam--probably it's also their means of space
propulsion. They mean to capture us, no doubt----"
"And they've reversed the beam!" Lents puffed as he turned away from the
ampliscope, pulling his sweat-soaked toga away from his fat body with
thumb and forefinger. "We're decelerating fast, but we can't feel it
because the force acts on every particle of our bodies exactly the same
as on the ship----"
"Proving," added Sine, looking out of the port curiously, "that it's a
true gravity beam!"
The utter stillness of their ship gave the illusion that she was
motionless, and that the sinister stranger was drifting toward them.
"It _is_ a ship!" Lents rumbled. "Look at her ports. But they're
shuttered."
"Not a bad idea," Sine agreed. "Protection against pin-point meteorites,
anyway." They saw now that the cylinder was slightly rounded at each
end, and the end presented to them had at its nose a circular
projection, not unlike a very large button, that glowed with a lavender
light, which they guessed to be the source of the gravity beam.
They were torn between the excitement of discovery and a very natural
apprehension. In the dim past, more than 200,000 years ago, there had
been a regular commerce between Earth and the Jovian colonies. But the
comet swarm, coming out of the mysterious depths of space, had released
to the solar system such swarms of meteorites as to make interplanetary
travel in the spatial belt between Mars and Jupiter utterly suicidal. It
required the passing of two thousand centuries to thin them out
sufficiently to permit the voyage of exploration in which these three
men were engaged.
What would these children of Earth look like after 200,000 years of
Jovian evolution? Would they be friendly?
They must, at any rate, be curious people. The great cylinder was
passing over them, and they had a better conception of its size. It was
at least twice as big as the 200-foot diameter Kass had estimated, and
fully 1500 feet long. A section of its hull slid open, and the
scientists felt the tug of mysterious forces on their own little vessel.
They drifted up into the opening, knew that the hatch had closed by the
shutting out of the solar glare. But there was no lack of light. They
could see the welded plates of the hull by an intense saffron light that
came from oval plates set in the wall. More of the gravity buttons were
ranged around the room. It appeared that they were regularly used in
handling freight. Now, as the little captive ship was tugged here and
there, the prisoners could see flashes of that penetrating lavender
light that seemed somehow solid.
"Get ready, men!" Sine said, breaking off his absorbed contemplation of
their surroundings. "Strap on your belts, and be sure your disintegrator
tubes are in their clips."
Lents was already lifting his toga and snapping his weapon belt around
his ample waist. A mere strip of flexible metal with pockets for the
atobombs and a clip for the delicate little tube--it might easily be
taken for a mere ornamental article of apparel.
"Hope they're friendly," Kass remarked, patting the buckle shut over his
flat diaphragm, "but if they aren't we can give 'em a thing or two to
think about."
The quartz ports, kept free from frost on the inside by a curtain of hot
dry air blown over them through a slit, suddenly misted over on the
outside, became opaque with a milky glaze of frost. This told the
prisoners that their captors were "bleeding" air into the hold, which
did double duty as an airlock. They heard vague clanging of metal on
metal, transmitted to them through the hull of their ship. Then a sharp
blade scraped away the ice from one of the ports, and a face peered in.
They looked at one another for a few moments, these cousins of the human
race, separated by 200,000 years of time and impassable meteor-strewn
wastes of space. The man at the port turned and beckoned to others, who
also surveyed the prisoners.
Then the first one, evidently the chief of this massive space vessel,
motioned to the prisoners, to open their manports.
"Keep together now!" Sine admonished his companions. "If they act
unfriendly we'll let them have the ray. Then you two slip back into your
own ship while I grab this vacuum suit out of the lock. With that on I
can carve a way out, and disable them, too."
"It would be a shame!" Kass said as he whirled the handwheel of the
inner manport, "but----"
The valve opened, and a few minutes later the three Earthmen stepped out
to confront the Jovians.
There were half a dozen of them, standing firmly, by virtue of the
artificial gravity, somehow produced. They were not far different from
Earthmen, except that they were shorter, being barely five feet tall.
Their tremendous muscles told of the race's adaptation to the superior
gravity of Jupiter. Their feet, encased in slippers of some burnished
material, were unusually large.
They were dressed in an armor of overlapping scales that covered every
part of their bodies, even their fingers. But their heads, instead of
being armored, were protected by a thin, transparent membrane that
followed the shape of their features closely. The Earthmen recognized
the protective covering used before the comet swarm as a defense against
the then used heat ray. So the Jovians had developed no new weapon! Sine
thought comfortably of his little disintegrator tube. He could make
those armored men vanish like puffs of smoke.
But they made no hostile move, and Sine had leisure to notice their
faces. If their bodies were too heavily muscled for grace, their heads
atoned for that defect. These were truly Jovian, god-like, combining
intense virility, dominance, courage. But there was also about them an
expression of intolerance, of ruthlessness, of selfishness. Here were
men, it could be seen, who would not be too scrupulous in attaining
their ends. But men, too, who could be charming companions.
Their leader, the man who had first looked into the port, now detached
himself from the group and came forward, his hand outstretched in the
old Earth gesture of friendliness. His appearance had all the
characteristics of his companions, but in a more striking degree. He was
taller than they, more than five feet, and his broad shoulders had the
confident bearing of accustomed command. He spoke, in a pleasant,
vibrant baritone:
"Welcome, men of Earth. Sorry for our little misunderstanding."
Sine gripped his hand, returned the muscular grip.
"It took us a little while to know what you were. And I may add that I'm
pleasantly surprised that we can still understand each other."
The Jovian shrugged his shoulder:
"Canned speech. No chance for a language to evolve when it's
mechanically recorded. But come up to my cabin. It's chilly here, and
your manner of dress----"
"_That_ has changed!" Sine smiled. "Lents and Kass, will you go ahead?"
CHAPTER II
The Pleasure Bubble
After the first suspicions had worn off, the Earthmen felt that they had
been singularly fortunate. To be captured by these intelligent beings
had been about the most convenient thing that could happen to them. They
might have found the human race entirely wiped out on the gloomy planet.
Or they might have been struck by one of the still inconveniently
numerous meteorites which would mean, at the very least, being marooned.
Had they possessed the ability to look into the future they would not
have rested quite so complacently in the hammocks assigned to them in
the great patrol ship.
The big Jovian, they learned, was chief of the ship. He told them his
name was Musters, and introduced his officers. They were an intelligent,
efficient lot. From them the Earthmen learned something of the social
organization of the human race as it survived on Jupiter.
"The race followed its natural evolution," intelligent and handsome
young Lieutenant Reko explained to Sine as they leaned against a railing
and gazed out of an unshuttered port at the somber splendors of Jupiter
as it gradually swelled and covered the firmament.
"Like mated to like, and so the superior individuals became more
superior, and the inferior ones more inferior. This resulted eventually
in two races. Naturally we took steps to properly segregate the inferior
race. Our efficiency experts have found ways to put them to work--to
make them quite useful in fact. Of course we could not trust them with
our weapons, our ships, our really important central power plants----"
What were these inferior--these so-called _Mugs_--what were they like?
Reko arched aristocratic eyebrows. Why, they were often quite human in
their appearance--though occupational diseases, and so forth----. Sine
gained the impression that they were kept out of the way in order not to
disturb the esthetic comfort of the superior race.
"There was a time when we had trouble with them," Lieutenant Reko said.
"There were trouble makers among them. They attacked the homes of the
First race, seized power control stations. Not fifty years ago there was
an insurrection. But the Mugs lost. Thousands upon thousands of them
were driven into the swamps and caves on the edge of the Tenebrian Sea.
They were never seen again, although we searched for them with our heat
rays. Perished, no doubt."
None were left now, Reko said, except those actually and fully occupied
at certain labors for which they were found efficient. They were allowed
to reproduce in sufficient numbers to fill the requirements--no more.
"What a rotten fate!" Sine exclaimed.
"They are quite a terrible people," Reko pointed out, closing a
distasteful subject.
A few sleep periods later Musters called his terrestrial guests to his
cabin.
"I have a pleasant surprise for you," he told them in his musical
baritone. "Our planetary conference would wish for me to give you a most
pleasant impression of Jupiter, so that interplanetary relations may be
resumed under the best possible conditions. For that reason I am going
to land you on a satellite that I'll wager will be a revelation to you.
It is the goal and object of every one of our people. But it is costly
and only a small portion of our population can be accommodated at a
time. You may judge the kind of place it is by the name the public has
given it: 'The Pleasure Bubble.' Come to the astrogator's cabin now;
I'll show it to you."
They followed Musters to a compartment in the rounded bow of the great
ship, stared out of a quartz port between opened shutters.
They saw Jupiter, immense, formidable, a mass of turbulent vapors, a
depressingly drab scene. Suddenly Lents exclaimed, incredulous;
"Look! A satellite! There is no satellite this close to Jupiter! It's
mathematically impossible!"
Musters laughed jovially. "It's there, isn't it? That's Jupiter's tenth
satellite--The Bubble. It is less than 100,000 miles from the vapor
envelope and has to travel so fast that its period is less than 8 hours.
It was built by the First Race and set on its orbit so that our people
would have a place where they could enjoy the sun, which is never seen
from Jupiter's surface."
"It _is_ a bubble!" Kass remarked, after an absorbed study of the
satellite. It was racing just beneath them, at a dizzy speed, like a
bubble blown before the wind. The ship followed the satellite, drawing
closer, so that it grew in size and beauty.
* * * * *
Lents was mentally calculating the rupturing pressure exerted by the
atmospheric pressure inside the crystalline ball. He stopped aghast at
the thought of the tremendous strain.
"That crystalline material stands the strain easily," Musters assured
them. "It will resist anything but a direct hit by a very large
meteorite. As you can see now, the sphere, which is about a mile in
diameter, is bi-sected by a plane surface, on which the city is built.
In that little area you will see reproduced the choicest conditions of
Earth." He turned earnest, hungry eyes on them:
"You don't know how lucky you people of Earth are!"
The ship was now coming quite close to the vast curve of the crystal,
and they could see glimpses of beautiful structures in fairylike
colorings, of small lakes like exquisite gems, of brilliant bursts of
light that they conjectured served as substitutes for the sun while it
was occulted by the enormous bulk of the planet.
Steadily the ship swept downward, to the level of the city, and the
Earthmen became aware that the entire sphere was not transparent
crystal. The part below the city level was a dull, ugly black.
"That's where the machinery is," Musters answered their questions,
somewhat shortly, it seemed. "Hydrogen integrators there--to generate
the power. Leakage of injurious rays down there--couldn't expect the
First race to work there."
"Who _does_ run the machinery?" Sine asked curiously.
"The labor Mugs, of course!" And Musters changed the subject.
The chief left them to their own devices as he superintended the lining
up of the big ship's airlocks with the lock gasket of The Bubble. This
effected, he bid his guests courteous farewell, assuring them that their
ship would be conveyed to the Jovian capital city of Rubio, where they
would be given every facility for repairing their damaged motor.
Sine was awakened by the talking of Kass and Lents as they sat at their
breakfast in their unimaginably luxurious apartment. They were near the
top of one of the fairylike towers they had glimpsed, and through the
crystalline roof they could see the blackness of star-studded space. Far
above was the glint of slanting sunlight on the outer covering of the
sphere. This was the fourth morning on The Bubble, and the Earthmen were
beginning to become vaguely restless. Their hosts had entertained them
royally, but--
"I didn't see anything funny about the way they shoved that labor Mug
out of the airlock," Lents was saying. "The poor devil! Stole a little
of the juice they call ambrosia. The way that elegant over-civilized
crowd laughed!"
"They lined up and watched the body floating alongside," Kass added
somberly. "And that Mug was as human as you or I."
Their words recalled the scene vividly to Sine's mind. The broad, green
field between two crescent lakes. The beetling-browed wretch, with eyes
full of fear that darted from side to side, led to the center of the
field by two splendidly armed warriors, there to be left alone in an
agony of uncertainty.
He saw again the half-hundred clean-limbed athletes, sons of rich Jovian
families. They were lined upon each side of the field. At the signal
they dashed in. The frightened labor Mug tried to escape. As one team
closed in he doubled, ran directly toward the others, saw his mistake
too late. There was a brief savage scrimmage, and the unfortunate victim
was stretched unconscious on the sward, while the victors and the
vanquished in this curious game joined arms and made for the baths where
exquisite nymphs peered coquettishly from behind delicately proportioned
columns. Sine reaped uncomprehending and resentful stares when he
declined to join them.
"Too rich for my blood," Sine told his companions at breakfast as they
discussed their experiences. "Hope they take us to Rubio soon. We've
done our job, and as for me, I'm not cut out for high Society."
After they had completed their breakfast a girl came hesitatingly into
their chamber. Sine stared at her curiously. She had none of the
enameled beauty of the women he had seen until then, but in her young
face was a subdued comeliness that was attractive after the assertive
pulchritude that was universal among the young women of the First Race.
Unlike the shrewd display of their chiseled perfection, this girl's
slender, rounded body was wrapped in a thin, gray garment that concealed
as it draped. It was caught by a cord around her waist. Her feet,
smaller and more fragile than the sturdy Jovian standard, were encased
in neutral buskins. She stood submissively, waiting for them to speak.
"What does that girl want?" Kass murmured aside. "My stars, she can't be
a labor Mug!"
"Come here, girl!" Lents rumbled kindly. "What can we do for you?"
The girl came forward hesitatingly. Her voice was soft, lacking the
brassy assurance of other Jovian women;
"I was sent here, masters, to guide you through hell."
Immediately after this startling statement her face turned a brilliant
red, then a deathly white. She half turned as if to flee, but, as if
realizing the uselessness of flight, she faced them again, defiantly;
"I don't care what happens to me!" she declared desperately. "I've told
the truth at least once. Jovians call this place The Pleasure Bubble,
but they don't have to live in the black half. Now tell them what I have
said."
"We will not tell anyone what you said, child," Lents rumbled
comfortingly. "But tell us. You don't look like the Mugs we've seen so
far--nor like the poor fellow we saw put through the airlock. They
seemed--a different race. But you--why--on Earth we could hardly tell
you from any other kid of your age."
A flash of spirit illuminated the girl's tragic, immature face.
"They call us a different race!" she exclaimed. "True--but not an
inferior race! They are the inferior race, though the stronger. They
depend on our knowledge, our labor, to live! My father told me so!"
* * * * *
Kass, who had been studying her silently, asked, "Your father?"
"Yes. The technic in charge of the machinery below. He was ordered to
escort you around. But his scars from the rays make it hard for him to
breathe today. He is in his bunk. So he sent me in his place."
Sine wondered if life under such unnatural and destructive conditions
would some day reduce this graceful girl to a horrible parody of
humanity. He asked;
"Do you work below?"
Her clear gray eyes fell on him.
"No. I was selected by the Committee to work in the Baths when I am
sixteen. I am fifteen now."
"Holy twisted nebulae!" Sine swore under his breath. "The kid doesn't
know what her work in the Baths is going to be! So the Committee
selected her for the Baths!" He felt suddenly a violent dislike for the
very rich Jovians, a feeling of fraternity with the Mugs.
"We will be very glad to have you guide us," he said formally. "What is
your name?"
"Proserpina. My father said it is fitting for one who lives where we
do."
Strange anachronism! That name from the mythology of Earth's youth. Like
that goddess of the underworld from misty antiquity, she led them down,
down, until it seemed they must be near the bottom of the black
hemisphere. It was a world of dim distances, of shadows, of pipes and
girders, or grisly abysses from which came mysterious sounds; of locked
chambers in which ghastly fires flared.
Now and then they met the inhabitants of the place; misshapen Robolds
going about unknown tasks. They stumbled suddenly out of unnoticed
passages, carrying burdens, grotesque, apelike, weary. Most of them were
hideously deformed.
Several times, when their journey led them into a certain part of the
hemisphere where they felt strange tingling of their nerves, the girl
led them away.
"We must not go there," she told them. "The integrators are there. There
my father received the scars of his chest that keep him from breathing.
Most of those who are blind worked there."
The Earthmen had already heard hints of the atomic integrators from
which the Jovians obtained endless power. They had no desire to get too
near those searing by-products of power.
"Do you mean to say," Lents asked, puffing a little from their
exertions, "that people down here live here all their lives?"
"I will show you our home," Proserpina said simply.
They came to it presently. A niche, a metal-laced nook, deep in the
hull. Gigantic girders formed one side of it. On the other side enormous
air conduits. It was clean, bare, not as depressing as they had
expected. It was more like a gallery, long and narrow, sparsely
furnished.
Something rolled out of a bunk at the farther end. Something like a
great spider. A man, stooped over, his once powerful body doubled, so
that his knuckles almost dragged on the floor-plates. He came toward
them, fierce gray eyes looking out at them under bushy brows. So
formidable that Sine's muscles tensed.
"Are these the visitors, Proserpina?" His voice was husky, as though his
constricted chest with difficulty performed its function. He looked at
them intensely.
"They tell me you are from Earth. Are you with us or against us?"
"Father, be careful!" She put her hand over his mouth, to be shaken off
impatiently. But the girl's warning had taken effect. The man--it was
impossible to tell if he were old or young--looked at them broodingly.
"My mother died here," Proserpina said. "And I am afraid he will. His
mind is not as clear--"
Lents, distressed to the bottom of his generous soul, helped the victim
of the Jovian pleasure moon back to his bunk. "This girl," he muttered
to Kass, "can't we get her out of here?"
He had not meant for her to hear, but her quick ears caught his words,
and a ray of hope illuminated her features. She was standing beside
Sine, and her thin fingers gripped his hard bronzed arm;
"Oh, could you take me away? I will be your slave!"
Sine gently disengaged her fingers. He was strangely embarrassed.
"I'd like to. But I'm a bachelor man. No place for you, you know."
She did not persist. No doubt she realized that she could not leave that
gaunt parody of a man who was her father.
When they bid farewell to Proserpina they were steeped in profound
depression. Alone in their room, they talked over what they had seen,
but they could think of no way to save Proserpina from her fate. They
were still discussing their visit when the manager of this satellite of
delights called on them and informed them that Governor Nikkia of
Jupiter awaited them in the capital city, Rubio. A space ferry was even
then clamped to the locks to take them to the mother planet.
CHAPTER III
The Coming of the Teardrops
Governor Nikkia was like the majority of the First Race. Although he was
not large of stature, his powerful muscles bulged impressively under his
clothing. The two relatively slender Earthmen, naked save for their
trunks, looked almost ridiculously puny. Lents' portly figure was more
impressive, but the big scientist had all he could do to carry his
weight, so uncomfortably augmented by Jupiter's great mass. The
unaccustomed thickness of the atmosphere, too, made the Earthmen
uncomfortable. The heat was excessive, for although the outer cloud
masses had been determined by photometric telescopic examination to be
near the freezing point of hydrogen, Jupiter's enormous store of
internal heat made its surface temperature average around 100 degrees
Fahrenheit. The humidity was high, and the explorers from Earth were
distressed.
Nikkia was a good host, however. He ordered out one of the government
cars, luxurious conveyances supported by gravity repulsion buttons, and
personally accompanied his guests on a tour of inspection through the
murky fog. They rode interminably over wet, domed roofs, down through
gloomy arcades. Thunder rumbled incessantly, and occasionally there came
a lurid glow of lightning.
For a city of Rubio's extent, they saw very few people. Occasionally
they saw the erect, confident figure of a member of the First Race,
tending some mighty engine whose purpose they could only guess. The
inhabitants preferred to stay indoors, if they could not afford to dally
in The Pleasure Bubble.
Nikkia listened with interest to the voyagers' account of their journey
through space. But he did not respond with much enthusiasm to the
suggestion that interplanetary commerce be resumed.
"We are comfortable," he said good-naturedly. "Besides, I'm not sure
that the Mugs could build ships suitable for such long trips. They're
getting lazier every day!" He shook his head regretfully.
"What do you expect?" Sine blurted. "You treat them like slaves, ruin
their lives, and then you're surprised because they lack ambition!"
Nikkia looked at him in mild astonishment. "But they have to be kept in
their place! If we gave them free hand they'd soon run us out. Why, not
fifty years ago----"
He told again of that uprising that had resulted in the breaking of the
Second Race's pretension. "We have to control 'em," he ended smugly.
The Earthmen were baffled by the bland indifference of the Jovians to
their mother planet. They met many of the First Race in the next few
days, but none seemed interested but the so-called Mugs, the Second
Race, and their interest was wistful akin to nostalgia.
But the three scientists were to learn that the First Race were good
fighting men, regardless of their short-comings in other lines.
* * * * *
The glowing "teardrops" appeared a little over a week later. They were
so called because of their shape, but the Jovians knew as little about
their nature as did their guests. They appeared early one murky morning,
as Kass, Sine and Lents sat at breakfast with Governor Nikkia. The
servants, comely, characterless specimens of the Second Race who held
themselves snobbishly above their fellows, came panic-stricken;
"Your Supremacy!" called one, making a low obeisance. "There are strange
lights hanging over the palace!"
Nikkia brushed the slight fellow aside, dashed up a stairway to a
terrace on the roof, closely followed by his guests. In a few moments
they were all soaked by the warm downpour as they stood on the terrace,
like an island in a sea of brown fog.
There were three of them, roughly egg-shaped, but with an elongated
tail. More like tadpoles, save that the tail was rigid and emitted a
fiery streak. Obviously they were propelled by a new adaptation of the
old rocket principle. They swam back and forth slowly, as if questing
for something, leisurely selecting their victims. The strangest thing
about them, however, was the light. A brilliant red, almost pink, like
the glow of a neon tube, it penetrated the fog. Its pulsations even
penetrated brain and body, so that the watchers became unpleasantly
conscious of it.
Nikkia, watching tensely, turned suddenly on his guests;
"Damned funny! Barely you show up, and now this! I don't like it. Are
they from the Earth?"
Lents swelled in slow and ponderous anger.
"Do you think, sir, that we are of the sort to abuse your hospitality by
spying on you? We don't know any more about those things than you do!"
"Damned funny!" Nikkia repeated to himself. "Wonder if there's any of
_them_ left?"
"Your Supremacy!" a servant interrupted. "Call from the war office!" He
was carrying a drum-like contrivance, carried on a stand, and set it
down in front of the governor.
"Well?" Nikkia snapped impatiently.
The screen which formed the drumhead glowed into life. A Jovian officer,
looking exceedingly efficient and warlike in his armor uniform, stood at
salute, which Nikkia returned impatiently.
"Who are those flyers, Sonta?" the governor snapped.
"I don't know, Your Supremacy," the officer growled. "They fail to
answer our challenge, and none of the men have seen anything like them."
"Then why don't you turn the heat on them?"
"We have. Our heat-rays have no effect on them. That pinkish light is a
reflector wave of some sort. Several of our beam projectors were burnt
up by the kick-back."
"Ram 'em then! Ram 'em! Sacred Ganymede! Is our Defense Service
degenerating into a crew of Mugs?"
* * * * *
The officer's image on the screen was seen to flush, to draw itself up
resentfully.
"We have sent ships up to ram them, Your Supremacy. Three of them have
been destroyed."
"I was watching. I saw nothing."
"The visibility is worse than usual. They are half a mile high. Our own
ships are invisible at a hundred yards. It's that cursed light."
Nikkia shut him off peremptorily.
"Never mind the conversation, Sonta. Get out every available defense
craft. Box those teardrops. Ram them. Destroy them--I don't care how!"
The screen was suddenly dark, and Nikkia gazed angrily up at the
mysterious glowing craft overhead. So far they had done no damage except
to the city's fighting ships.
"Listen!" Sine exclaimed. His body glistened like wet bronze as he stood
in the half darkness and strained to catch some sound over the steady
patter of rain. "Lents, quit puffing!"
From high overhead, some sounds were coming to them. A steady, droning
rush, like the sustained exhaust of rockets. That must be from the
visitors, for the official ships were equipped with the gravity buttons.
Now and again one of the glowing teardrops would be thrown violently
from its course, evidently the effect of impingement of the gravity
beam. But not one was disabled. The defense ships were not faring so
well. Every little while there would be a fog-muffled crash as one of
them crashed, throwing a stone roof into the street. But none fell near
the governor's palace.
It was uncanny. No sound save that low, sibilant roar, and an occasional
crash out there somewhere in the darkness. The mysterious attacking
ships so plainly visible and so immune, and the defensive fighting
craft, flying in silence and invisibility--crashing anonymously.
Nikkia had dropped his air of assurance and calm superiority. He was
frankly worried, and still a little suspicious of his guests. This
attack--it did seem rather a coincidence. What would Sonta have to
report now?
He twisted a dial on the side of the communication drum. A junior
officer appeared on the screen.
"What the devil?" the governor exploded. "Where is Sonta? I'll have him
broken for this! Lieutenant, call Colonel Sonta at once!"
"Your Supremacy," the lieutenant said respectfully, "Colonel Sonta went
up in one of the guard ships, and it has been reported crashed south of
the catalyst plants."
For a second Nikkia stared at the screen, then snapped the switch
wordlessly.
The attackers seemed to have broken down the capital's defenses. Here
and there, through the thick, greasy fog, a lurid red glow would take
life. That was the fog-diffused reflection of a heat-beam, probing the
sky for the "teardrops." After a little while the glow would flare up
and as suddenly die down, followed by utter blackness. Another heat-beam
out of commission.
Nikkia was frantically polling all of the city's defense commanders.
They reported failure with monotonous regularity. The electronic barrage
wall around the city had been passed easily--the equipment wrecked. A
proton bombardment had yielded exactly nothing--He snapped the switch,
peered eagerly at the mist curtain overhead--there was a series of heavy
concussions. The glowing visitors were being bombarded from above. The
screen glowed again....
"... but the bombs are all detonated long before they get in effective
range of...."
Close by a vague shape--a darker shadow in the muggy air, suddenly
materialized. It was falling swiftly--a familiar cylindrical shape with
rounded ends--one of the Jovian guard ships. It struck scarcely a
hundred yards from the palace--struck with a jarring burst of sound like
rending metal. Then utter silence again, and darkness. No cry of wounded
man. No man could survive that fall and live.
"Some kind of emanation--shields them from all known attack--" Nikkia
swore monotonously and regularly.
The glowing ships now settled down to the real purpose of their attack.
They began to course back and forth across the city, methodically. Like
burning meteors they disappeared over the horizon, to the city's
farthest suburbs, back again, as if over a measured and marked course.
And like burning, melting meteorites, they shed trails of sparks,
blazing liquid. Wherever these fiery drops landed there ensued
immediately a dry crackling, followed by the rattle of falling masonry.
As none of the buildings were inflammable, there was no danger of fire.
But wherever this incendiary trail fell, stone cracked and crumbled.
"They are destroying us! Forty million people live here in Rubio. They
will kill us all, women and children too!"
"_Who_ are _they_?" Sine asked suddenly.
* * * * *
Nikkia looked at him bleakly. "Who? Why, the Mugs, of course! Those we
banished. Those we thought we wiped out."
"Oh, yeh." Sine's intonation was very dry. "They're giving you a dose of
your own medicine."
Nikkia did not reply. As if he apprehended, too late, that his statement
might have sounded like a plea for help, he shrugged his massive
shoulders with elaborate indifference, saying;
"I and my wives are not afraid to die!"
The Earthmen could no longer watch this ruthless destruction, however,
regardless of the provocation.
"You say that pink light is a protection against every _known_ mode of
attack?" Sine asked, turning sharply to the governor.
"Yes. And that's sufficient, isn't it?"
"Is it proof against _this_?" Sine jerked the little tube out of its
clip, directed it against a stone parapet that loomed grotesquely
through the fog. A brilliant white beam leaped forth, cutting the fog
like a bar of platinum. Then there was darkness, and the governor,
examining the parapet, noted with growing hope that a stone pillar, a
foot in diameter, had been cut off smoothly, cleanly.
"The disintegrating ray!" he murmured. "I have read of that, in fiction.
But here! Here it is!"
Suddenly he was all energy.
"Will you use this weapon against our enemies? I assure you that you
will be well rewarded. As much eka-iodine as your ship will carry! My
own ship is here, in the courtyard. It is swift, and powerful. You have
already learned the controls. Take it. Bring down those murderers!"
The fiery meteor was coming toward them again, planting a swath of death
a hundred yards wide. There was really only one answer possible. The
terrestrial scientists, having come on a mission of peace and discovery,
stepped forward in unison.
"Give me the activator key!" Sine said crisply. "Lents, will you see
that the port gaskets are loose? Kass, I'd like to have you take the
controls."
"Right! Right!" They ran past the governor of the greatest planet in the
solar system, ignoring him, down the broad stairs, through halls of
weighty magnificence, and into the rain-sluiced courtyard.
The governor's ship was waiting there. Not very large, but fine. Its
polished metal gleamed richly.
"Quick, inside!" Sine threw open the manport valves. They were inside.
The gravity buttons glowed with their peculiarly material lavender
light, and the ship rose vertically with swift acceleration.
From the sky the death trails left by the invaders were clearly visible
through the murk which obscured everything else--a pink, pulsating
light. And the three glowing vessels were coming toward them.
"Get above them, Kass!" Sine commanded. "When they pass under I'll let
them have it."
Closer and closer they came, those blobs of light. The Earthmen could
see nothing but the light--get no hint of their construction. But that
there were men inside they never doubted. The glowing ships seemed to
swell, to expand monstrously, and their throbbing emanations became more
furious. They seemed to hesitate as they were about to pass beneath.
"They see us?" Lents rumbled, pulling at his toga nervously. The cloth
was soaked, clinging to his fat body.
"Close enough!" Sine decided, leaning out of a port, disintegrator ray
tube in his hand.
At that instant the strange pink light seemed to encompass the whole
planet. They were bathed in it. The fog was a sea of baleful pink. Sine
stiffened into impotent rigidity. The ray tube fell from his numbed
fingers. He felt himself floating, weightless, in a sea of red that
smothered him deliciously. And swiftly even that consciousness was
succeeded by black oblivion.
CHAPTER IV
The Monstrosities
"He's coming out of it. Hand me the water, Lents."
Sine awoke to see Kass bending over him. He felt weak and languid, and
the memory of recent events was returning only slowly. He looked around,
saw that he was lying in a chamber about fifteen feet square, evidently
hewn out of solid rock.
"Are you all right, Sine? Answer me, boy!" Kass' bald head gleamed in
the yellowish light of a single emanation tablet on the ceiling.
"I'm all right. Where are we?"
"Under the sea. Some hidden city of the Second Race--those that were
banished. We are prisoners, but honored prisoners it seems."
Sine passed his hand over his eyes.
"How did we get here?"
"Some kind of emanation of theirs--the brightening of that light, I
guess. It had a paralyzing effect. I know I froze where I stood, unable
to move a step. And I was protected by the hull. Same with Lents. But
you had your head out of the port--caught the full effect. It laid you
out cold."
"They boarded us then," the fat man supplied.
"As easy as that! Simply boarded us, herded me and Lents into their own
ship, which is just as suitable for navigating in water as in air. As
for you, they had to carry you."
"Better tell him what to expect," Lents suggested.
Kass explained, with considerable scientific interest:
"The First Race was not so far wrong in calling them 'terrible people.'
They are, a race of monstrosities. Men with four or six arms, men with
hair like fur all over their bodies. With heads ten times too large.
With boneless tentacles instead of limbs. With scales instead of skin.
Quite horrible. And yet, most of them are highly intelligent, with
normal human emotions, and painfully conscious of their deformities."
"I don't quite understand." Sine was flexing his muscles, sitting up
with the support of one elbow. He saw he was lying on a pallet of dried
sea weed. "What caused these abnormalities?"
"Well, you know--" Lents was speaking judiciously. "You know all about
the mutations produced by X-rays in the biological laboratories?"
"Of course!" For approximately a million years these actions of X-rays
had been understood--their ability to bring about extraordinary
mutations in the life-germ, whether animal or vegetable--the
acceleration of natural evolution a millionfold. "But you don't mean to
say the First Race deliberately brought about these mutations in the
Mugs?"
"Not deliberately. But they permitted it with utter callousness. You
know those hydrogen integrators we saw at a distance in the dark half of
The Bubble. Those things are the source of most of the power used by the
Jovians. But the generators have a mighty dangerous by-product--the
cosmic ray series, for instance, a particularly destructive band below
the X-ray spectrum too."
Sine nodded comprehension, his eyes hardening as he thought of the
grotesque, distorted wreck of humanity who was Proserpina's father. A
mere whim of fortune that he had not been condemned to that hell before
she was born, or she might have been one of those unfortunate
mutations--
Might yet become one! Not only could the rays deform the offspring. They
could distort the full-grown, normal body. Sine felt increasingly
dismayed as he thought of this immature, quiet-eyed girl, this waif of
an alien world. He experienced a recurrence of the indignation he had
previously felt. This selfish, superior First Race! Condemning the
weaker people to torture and death so they could enjoy a little
paradise! The Pleasure Bubble they called it. Sphere of the Damned was
better! For the unfortunate consigned to the dark hemisphere was
condemned to an inferno that surpassed the Ancient's most perfervid
imagination.
"I wish we could save Proserpina!"
The words were out before Sine knew it. Kass stopped in the middle of a
sentence and lifted a quizzical eyebrow.
"Oh, get the romantic ideas out of your heads!" Sine snapped. "You know
she's just a kid. I couldn't take care of her if we did take her back to
Earth. But I'd like to take her out of The Bubble!"
Lents pulled at his toga thoughtfully. It was dirty, still wet, and
smelled not too pleasantly.
"I could take care of her," he said slowly, and his deep bass voice was
a little wistful. "My wife would be glad--we're getting old, and no
children--"
"We-ell," Kass submitted practically. "I'd like to take her away, and
her poor old daddy too--or is he old? But what's the use of discussing
all that? Here we are prisoners, and she's a prisoner of the First Race,
and we shall never see her again. Or the good old Earth either," he
added sadly.
A man entered the room. He looked more like a normal man than might have
been expected--only his exaggerated dish-face, his bulbous forehead
proclaiming him just another victim of the First Race's industries. Or
his shrill, treble voice as he announced:
"Gentlemen of Earth, the Manager and his council expect you in the
office. Follow me." He turned, waited for them to come.
The Manager's messenger led them up a long, ascending tunnel meagerly
lighted at intervals by small emanation tablets. After they had gone
perhaps a hundred yards the hewn rock gave way to what was evidently a
kind of concrete.
"This part of their city is built above the ocean floor," Kass remarked
quietly. "They brought us in through airlocks. Passages lead to caves
along the shore where the original refugees holed up. These are mostly
their children, so marked and deformed even in embryo."
Their dish-faced guide now stepped aside as they entered a spacious
chamber with a domed ceiling. Here and there it was wet. No doubt above
there was the sea. Lents made a rapid mental calculation, rumbled into
Sine's ear:
"Can't be so deep. Not over a hundred feet; maybe less. Otherwise those
arches couldn't carry the weight."
* * * * *
A hush fell upon the room. The leader of this strange people--the one
they called The Manager, was rising from his seat back of a desk. His
head was very large, his eyes large, liquid and expressive. A total lack
of eyebrows, of hair on his head, gave a mixture of the comical and the
obscene to his appearance. But the respect with which his counselors,
ranged on either side of him, regarded him, ignored his appearance. They
were all, without exception, victims of the strange and terrible
mutations of type induced by the First Race's callous disregard to the
dangers of the rays. All wore loose garments of drab material which
concealed their deformities to some extent.
The Manager's large, intense eyes fastened on the Earthmen, and he
addressed them:
"Men of Earth: We have captured you in battle, but we would be friends
with the Old World. Why did you try to fight us?"
"You were murdering helpless victims," Sine said shortly. "It was not
our fight, but we could not stand by and permit such a thing."
Something like amusement flashed up in The Manager's enormous eyes, so
old, weary and wise.
"So you could not bear to think of an easy death for those of the First
Race? What think you of their treatment of us?" He raised a scrawny
arm--so thin it suggested a skeleton. "Hunted like beasts--imprisoned
and tortured! Are we not human?"
"You see," Kass interposed diplomatically--"we were their guests. And in
a way their quarrel...."
The Manager cut him short peremptorily:
"You were their guests! You lolled with them in The Pleasure Bubble, in
the beautiful sun! The sun that most of us have never seen! And down in
the dark half-human beings like yourselves--toiled and slaved at those
devilish integrators to keep the machinery of pleasure going.
"You were the guests in the Governor's palace--in the magnificent city
of Rubio, though to you it may seem dismal. But did you think of the
poor slaves, deep underground, in the slimy sewers, in the uranium pits,
in the power plants? You basked in luxury with the First Race, and their
fight was your fight--their enemies...."
He was working himself into a fury, evidently forgetting the original
purpose of this conference with the prisoners. But one of the counselors
now approached him, bowed respectfully so that his scaly face was
hidden. The Manager cut short his tirade.
"What is it, Gnom?"
"Isn't The Manager digressing?" Gnom asked in a hollow voice. "These men
of Earth are now our guests. They come at an opportune time--when we
shall reap the fruits of our long planning. If we wrest power from the
First Race, shall we not need the friendship of the Mother Planet? Let
them, then, carry our story to Earth, if it be that we may need their
help."
The Manager stood in thought. At last, coming to a decision, he asked
sharply:
"With whom do you stand, men of Earth? With us or our oppressors?"
Kass and Lents looked at one another blankly. They started as Sine spoke
up sonorously, beside them:
"Officially, we are supposed to be neutral. But if you attack The Bubble
and rescue the poor devils in the dark hemisphere I'll help!"
But The Manager shook his enormous head slightly.
"That we can not do. That satellite is too far out in space. There is no
concealment, and we can not yet fight their patrol ships in space."
"Listen!" Sine persisted. "There is a man there I know. He's about ready
to die, unless he gets away. And he has a girl, a kid of fourteen or
fifteen. The rays haven't made a freak out of her yet. I want to save
her. Give me a ship and I'll take her out myself!"
"That we can not do. Individuals do not count. One, or a hundred, may
die. We can not endanger our plan."
The counselors had drawn a little away from the Earthmen, unconsciously
symbolizing their support to The Manager. Again he raised his bony arm.
"Up above there our ships are destroying every city of the First Race on
the planet. Our power-beams for the glowing ships are encircling Jupiter
in a network of red and death--death to the oppressors! The Pleasure
Bubble's turn will come. And when it is dashed down, master and slave
must die together. To save the slaves might let some of the masters
escape."
"Gentlemen!" Kass was trying to smooth over the situation, "We have been
sent here on a voyage of discovery, not of war. We regret your troubles
here--but we can take no part in them. Our attitude is friendly to...."
"No! Damned if I will!" Sine shouldered his iron-hard body through the
close-packed counselors, so that he stood directly before The Manager,
who did not shrink from the formidable young man. "If you murder those
poor Mugs in the black hemisphere, I'm your enemy from now on!"
"And I!" The words boomed and reverberated in the vaulted chamber, and
Lents moved his bulky body beside Sine.
"And I too!" Kass' naked, skinny torso glistened with sweat. "The First
Race may be murderers, but they're magnificent murderers. They wouldn't
forget their friends!"
The Manager's large, liquid eyes seemed suddenly filmed over. He jerked
his enormous head sharply, snapped:
"We waste time. Put these meddlers out through the locks, that they may
feed the fish."
* * * * *
But Gnom again interposed.
"If The Manager will permit--there is much water on Earth. They may know
how to swim--might go to the top and escape--"
"True, Gnom. I have a truly great brain, as all the oppressed admit, but
details escape me. Call one of the watch, put them to death first."
Gnom turned, looked into one of the larger passages that centered on
that room. He turned his blank, scaly face.
"The watch is not here!"
"Perhaps he was called. See!"
But before Gnom could execute the order a commotion arose in the
passage. A voice called from outside:
"Officer of the hour prays audience with The Manager."
"Enter."
An officer with an extreme hunchback dashed in, bowed low before The
Manager.
"It is the end!" he gasped. "They watched our glowing ships plunge under
the water, and they are setting bombing rockets for this area. The first
ranging shots have already been fired. Listen!"
After a few moments there came a dull thud, as though a blow had been
struck against the ceiling. A pendent drop of water fell. The Manager's
hairless face became bleak.
"I made great plans, great inventions--forgot a simple detail!" He
slumped as he stood, a mixture of the absurd and the tragic. The
mutation that had made a brilliant mind had nevertheless left it
incomplete, and none had realized it until in this extremity. Again came
that dull shock, and this time it seemed a little stronger.
The Manager shook off his apathy. His great eyes burned with livid fire,
as he called:
"Officer of the watch. Take these prisoners to the locks. Kill them and
put them out."
"I obey!" The officer, squat, with enormous torso, pointed a small wand,
pointed with a tiny spot of that peculiar pulsating pink light,
threateningly. Stolidly he herded them through a broad corridor. Now and
then they passed inhabitants of this submarine city, nightmarish,
pitiable creatures, now disturbed, dreading death. Sine wondered
vaguely that they should cling to such an unhappy existence.
He was recalled to their own predicament when a metal gate, closed by a
screw-wheel, loomed up in the poor light. The inside lock! The guard
motioned them ahead, stood between them and the passage. He fumbled at
his belt, ignoring the dull hammerblows of explosions transmitted by the
water. He seized Kass by the throat, prepared to plunge the knife into
his body.
Sine leaped past, crooked his arm around the man's thick neck, attempted
to break his neck. But a giant arm threw him off easily. He fell to the
floor. Like an echo came the concussion of another explosion.
The guard, without trace of ill-humor, turned his attention to Sine. He
pointed the little wand at him, and the light glowed brighter. Sine felt
again that torturing paralysis. His senses were leaving him. The pink
light was throbbing, expanding....
He wondered why the stones of the passage should be pushing in, spurting
water. The pink light faded. Tepid water struck him, stinging like
needles. There was a roaring, blackness. A fat arm hooked around his
waist--Lents', no doubt. He felt himself borne along in a swirl of
water, strangling, fighting blindly. There was another terrific
explosion shock, an interminable climbing struggle. Then his head broke
water and he breathed air again. Lents came up beside him, puffing and
blowing, and after a long wait--so long that they despaired, Kass came
weakly to the surface.
CHAPTER V
The Struggle for Freedom
They were afloat, and comparatively safe from the rockets which shrieked
out of the leaden sky and threw spectral waterspouts up into the fog
before they exploded. Unless one exploded directly under them, or very
near, they would be safe--for the time being.
"Which way is shore?" Lents puffed.
"Rockets seem to come from that way," Sine answered, flipping his hand.
"Swim that way. Fish probably lost appetites, so won't bother us."
The bombardment had indeed frightened away the monsters of the deep, and
even the dead in the ruined submarine city would rest in peace for a
while. But the Earthmen, after several hours of swimming, doubted that
this was more than a postponement of death. The long greasy swells were
rising, presaging another of Jupiter's unimaginably violent storms.
"I see a light!" Sine strained his eyes to get another glimpse of it
through the brown fog. "There it is again." Something was moving slowly
through the air a short distance over the water, following the course of
the rockets, which had ceased coming. A powerful searchlight was cutting
through the murk. A war party of the First Race, looking for wreckage.
In their methodical search they soon found the swimming men, and they
were helped into the chief's cabin. Sine, looking up with half-blinded
eyes, saw Governor Nikkia sitting in his chair, looking at him coldly.
"So!" the governor bit off his words. "The traitors are fished out." His
arrogant, handsome face was vindictive, uncompromising. "We forgot that
the aborigines of Earth would naturally sympathize with their equals,
the Mugs! That was nicely timed, your 'visit.' How long have you been in
communication with the rebels?"
The Earthmen, weak and exhausted by their long exposure, resisted their
desire to lie down on the floor. They stood before the governor, hemmed
in by hostile fighting men, and tried to maintain the traditions and
dignity of their planet.
"We were not in communication with your slaves," Sine declared. "You
should know that. Your radio monitors would have picked up any messages,
and your own patrol ships picked us up when we were far out in space.
Our mission is one of peace. As for your quarrels, they do not concern
us. We are strictly neutral."
Nikkia laughed, a short, clipped bark in which there was little
amusement.
"Well, your guilt is a matter of small moment anyway. We have paid the
Mugs for the damage they did, and they will not have another chance. And
if they had an idea of getting help from Earth, you shall be an object
lesson on the uselessness of such hopes."
"Meaning?" But Sine and his companions knew that the meaning must be
evil.
"Meaning," Nikkia snapped, "that from now on you three are Mugs, no
better and no worse than the Jovian Mugs. Except that I shall instruct
the labor office to put you to work at one of the power
integrators--perhaps in The Bubble. We don't want to waste you" he added
with grim humor--"and the gravity here on Jupiter might reduce your life
of usefulness."
The governor turned his back in dismissal, and the prisoners were
hustled into a dark, extremely hot storage hold. Here they lay down amid
an untidy collection of miscellaneous gear, thick with dust. They rested
gratefully until some of their strength should return to them.
When they awoke from their sleep of exhaustion they were aware that the
ship had landed, and a few minutes later the door of their prison was
opened and an officer, heat pistol trained on them, commanded the
prisoners to get into another ship for transfer to the metal and crystal
satellite where they were condemned to drag out the rest of their lives
as slaves.
The second coming of the Earthmen to The Bubble was in marked contrast
to their first. Instead of the large, commodious lock in the upper
hemisphere, they entered this time through a drab, dull orifice in the
black half of the sphere. The patrol ship which brought them was
contacted without ceremony. They were thrust though with curt orders to
ask somebody for the Mug superintendent's office. Then the valve closed
behind them. There was a grating sound as it was locked from the
outside, and then silence. The ship was gone. They were marooned in the
gloom, the grisly domain of the rays and the Mugs. Sentenced for life,
with their only companions, a few broken, despairing men.
The corridor in which they found themselves sloped gently downward, and
artificial gravity made it possible to walk naturally. Sine taking the
lead, they passed into the depths. Everywhere were monstrous shadows,
with occasional stabbing eerie beams of light. But it seemed that an
ominous hush hung over this metal-interlaced gulf. Here there was no
sense of motion--no sense of bubble-like lightness. It was like a
descent into the nether regions of the ancient--into an inferno. But of
the denizens of this dismal place there was no trace.
"Let's go to Proserpina's home," Sine suggested. "I'm anxious to see if
she's still all right. And the old man too."
Accordingly they watched for the numbered corridor, and after some
fruitless wandering, came again to the deep crack that was the only home
this timid girl knew. She started up in terror as the Earthmen came into
view. Not unnaturally, for they were all bristly with unshaven beards
and grimy with the dust they had collected when prisoners in the Jovian
ship's hold.
But after her first reaction of terror she gave a glad cry, and running
up to Sine, threw her thin arms around his muscular neck.
"Now listen, kid!" The young scientist began with unwonted
embarrassment. But the girl clung to him, and he could not quite bring
himself to tear her arms away. She released him herself, in a few
moments, became suddenly shy.
Lents laughed with genuine amusement.
"Don't be silly, Sine. She's just glad to see us again. Poor kid was
lonesome. Come here, Prosie."
* * * * *
She went to him, gravely embraced him; then Kass.
They noticed she was trembling.
"What's the matter?" Kass asked. "You act as if you're glad to see us,
but wished we hadn't come."
"Why are you here?" she asked with a troubled frown.
The Earthmen told her of what had transpired--that they were now
condemned for life to serve in the dark hemisphere. As they spoke her
fears seemed to vanish. She became radiant with delight.
"Then you have come at the right time!" she cried. "Our slavery is at an
end, and you shall pilot us back to the Mother planet!"
"You're not crazy, are you kid?" Sine asked, lifting her little pointed
chin with his hand.
"No!" she laughed delightfully. "Not crazy!" And she would have embraced
Sine again. "My father has been building a ship for the past two years,
hoping to escape to Ganymede, or some other moon of Jupiter. But now we
shall go to Earth!" She clapped her hands excitedly.
"Listen! Let's get this straight," Lents demanded. "You say your dad has
built a ship. Where is it?"
"Way down in the bottom of the hemisphere. That's where all the Mugs
are, working on it when they have time. Dad's chest feels better again."
"They have built a ship, huh?" Sine was trying to suppress the hope that
flamed up madly. "How'll they get it out?"
"They've made an airlock, so that when we leave the escaping air won't
give us away."
It was one of these things that seem too good to be true. But when the
Earthmen accompanied the girl to the secret workshop, directly next to
the sphere's outer skin, they found she had spoken the truth in every
respect. The men there, nearly all pathetic wrecks of the First Race's
system, were at first a little doubtful about admitting the Earthmen,
but one after another they were won over to the idea of seeking
sanctuary on Earth rather than on some satellite of Jupiter where they
would never be entirely safe. Besides, the Earthmen, though they had
been stripped of all their weapons, represented additional fighting
strength.
They made their final preparations with mixed feelings. Many of the Mugs
had relatives on Jupiter, though few had wives or children. Even women
of the Second Race had no desire to share the fate of a man condemned to
a lifetime in the black half of the Bubble. Those few women who had
accompanied their men to the metal satellite would, of course, be taken
along, for the escape ship was commodious.
The next two weeks were filled with arduous labor, but at last the ship
was ready, and observation through a small port which had been
installed, showed that they were about to enter the shadow of Jupiter.
Under cover of darkness they would leave the airlock. They would
accelerate past The Bubble. Centrifugal force would send them away from
Jupiter. At the same time their velocity with relation to the sun would
be diminished. Lents plotted a long, graceful curve that would bring
them to Earth with the best possible speed.
Proserpina's father lay on the floor, peering out through the port.
"Remember, Jan," Lents reminded him, "as soon as we cut the shadow, you
give the order." They were all in the ship save the Earthmen and Jan,
lying on the floor like a great spider, with his tremendous chest
laboring painfully.
"In a moment now," Jan said. "The sun is nearing the limb."
"Open! Open, you aberrated spores!" The command came but faintly through
the inside valve of the emergency airlock.
"They've found out!" Kass gasped. "Quick, never mind the shadow!"
Jan had already leaped to the long cylindrical hull, the product of
endless labor and sacrifice.
"Inside!" Sine shouted. Kass and Sine made for the ship's manports.
"I'll take care of the thermite."
In his hand he carried a small heat pistol that had long ago been stolen
and hidden by a Mug. Quickly he made a circuit of the room, which was
like an enormous sheet-metal blister on the inside of the metal
satellite. After the thermite had cut out the ship free, that blister
would prevent the escape of air, saving the lives of thousands of the
First Race and also preventing discovery of their escape for a time.
The thermite was piled generously in a ridge all the way around. Sine
leaped inside the first valve of the manport, colliding with a soft
body.
"Get inside, kid!" He leveled his pistol at the thermite ridge where it
was nearest to him. High time too. The walls of the blister were
radiating heat. The fools were turning their infra-red beams on it!
"Lock!" Sine shouted, pressing the trigger and jumping back.
Instantly the ship was surrounded by an oval of brilliant orange and
white fire. The valve clicked shut in Sine's face, and he dived through
the second one into the interior, tripping the lock of that one also.
Through the ports nothing was to be seen now save fire. They were in an
inferno of brilliant light and heat. But through the glare and smoke
Sine saw a white-hot spot suddenly appear on the blister wall. The
Jovians were melting their way through! The metal plates sagged like wet
paper, dropped limply. Back of the hole, luridly illuminated, stood the
foremost of a detachment of fighting men, eager to leap to the fray,
waiting only for the metal to cool a little.
But the thermite had been burning steadily, biting through the tough
skin of the metal moon. Just as the fugitives were beginning to wonder
whether they would be incinerated in their self-made prison there was a
lurch. Through the hull of their own vessel they could hear the tearing
of metal as the weakened plates were sheared away. They found themselves
in space, with the great ball of the Pleasure Bubble floating away from
them. Just outside of the gaping hole in the sphere floated the bodies
of twenty or thirty men, blown out by the escaping air.
The air was escaping in a prodigious geyser; unimpeded by an atmosphere,
it spewed out, visible like a cloud due to its moisture, smooth like an
inflating balloon without billows. The ball of vapor expanded swiftly
toward the gray vastness of Jupiter 100,000 miles below, enveloping the
fugitive ship for a time, then passing on, like an enormous milky white
cloud, falling swiftly until it was lost in the darkness, still
expanding.
Overhead The Bubble continued serenely on its course, the sweeping curve
of its crystal hemisphere visible. But now the actinic lights that had
served as artificial suns were dark. The great man-made paradise was as
cold and dead as the Earth's moon. Death stalked its pleasure palaces.
Already up there the pleasant rippling lakes must be skimmed over with
ice, the luxuriant vegetation stiff, crackling with frost.
Despite the selfishness, the cruelty, the utter callousness of the First
Race, Sine felt a pang of regret over the destruction of so much beauty.
A messenger from the astrogator's cabin, a man whose skin was seared and
scorched so that it looked like an alligator's hide, touched Lents' arm.
"Jan would like to have you verify the course." There was apprehension
in the man's voice. Member of a race so long enslaved, restrained, he
feared the freedom of open space.
They swept slowly past The Bubble, gaining speed. Suddenly there was a
cry from the stern look-out:
"The ship's heating. Stop it! Something's wrong."
Sine, rushing to answer the call, found that the ship was indeed heating
up. Shielded from the sun's rays as they were, this was inexplicable.
And then he saw the dull red pinpoint of light.
He had not seen it before, that patrol ship, clinging like a leech to
the airlock of the crystal hemisphere. There had been men in there when
the air escaped. They had been saved from death by the closing of their
automatic airlocks.
"Better get back into the shelter of The Bubble," he told Jan after a
hurried trip to the astrogator's cabin. The spider man turned the
vessel, and they scurried back to shelter. Although the patrol ship
tried its gravity buttons on them, the Mugs had fully equipped their own
vessel with similar, and larger buttons which were occasionally used in
regulating the metal satellite's orbit. They could neutralize the other
vessel's gravity force with ease.
"And yet," Sine admitted to the serious little group in the cabin, as
they once more floated in space under the immense sphere, "they seem to
have us stymied."
"Suppose they follow us around here?" Kass asked somewhat nervously.
"I don't think they can," Sine said. "I noticed when we came to The
Bubble first, the ships are locked to the gaskets from inside the
sphere. The men inside the ship can not unlock their ship unless they
open the emergency air curtain. If they did their air would all escape
through the sphere. They could do it, of course, if they put on space
suits. But that procedure would take an hour, and in the mean time we
could get out of range of their heat rays. So we have them stymied too.
Except for one thing----"
"Of course," Lents grunted. "We can't get at them, and they can't get at
us, but in a few hours we'll be in sunlight again, and some patrol will
pick us up."
The Mugs, watching fearfully from beyond the doorway, turned aside. Were
they, after a mere glimpse of freedom, to be immediately returned to the
bondage which had become unbearable to them? Sine felt a small, thin
hand slip into his. He looked down into the wistful face of Proserpina
looking up at him with hope, with confidence. All at once his shyness
vanished as he realized that Proserpina's obvious adoration for him was
only the admiration of a child for a very big and very wonderful
brother. At the same time his desire to do something to release them all
from their peril was intensified by the imperatively felt need to
justify her confidence in him. An idea came.
"Jan," he asked. "What is the energy output--the total capacity--of our
gravity buttons?"
Jan named an approximate figure in ergs.
"Lents, if you've ever calculated to a purpose, calculate now! How much
energy is represented by the mass of that sphere at its orbital
velocity?"
"I get you!" The fat scientist puffed out his cheeks with excitement.
"Have to estimate the mass first." He picked up a stylus from the
astrogator's table, worked furiously on a tablet. Kass and Jan watched
apprehensively. The Pleasure Bubble, with its freight of the dead, was
hurrying remorselessly to its rendezvous with the sunlight.
"Whoops!" Lents threw his tablet into the air in extravagant triumph.
"She'll do!"
"Stations!" shouted Jan, in his curious strained voice, and men rushed
eagerly to their posts, still hazy as to their object but cheered by the
knowledge that there was hope after all.
Then began one of the strangest duels in the history of the solar
system. Setting the nose of their vessel against the gigantic metal
satellite, they directed the stern gravity buttons against a distant
star, and applied full force to slow the sphere in its orbit.
The forces liberated were terrific. The sphere's tough skin, three
inches thick, buckled and bent inward until the ship was almost buried
in a pit of its own creation. Jan stood hunched over the activator lever
like a great spider, ready to throw it into neutral at the first sign of
an actual rupture, which would send them crashing through the internal
cells and girders of the sphere.
"She's folding up like a squeezed orange peeling!" Kass muttered,
running his hand over his bald head.
"Built to withstand internal pressure--nothing like this," Jan gasped.
"Stout ship, this!" he added a moment later. "We thought we might have
to ram our way out."
She was indeed a stout ship--this vessel of escape. Though she shivered
and groaned, she gave no indication of failure.
"Wonder if the others are pushing against us!" Kass suddenly thought of
another possibility.
"We--can--outpush 'em." Jan gasped. "Got to sit down. Here you take it!"
Sine stepped into his place. Vague shocks and noises were transmitted to
them through the hull. The huge sphere was collapsing progressively.
Lents came puffing from an observation port.
"She's slowing!" he reported triumphantly. "Our trajectory--give her a
little more!"
The Joy Bubble was becoming more and more disc-shaped, and it was slowly
turning on a major axis as the contending forces became uncentered.
"Flopping like a flapjack," Lents commented as he watched the shifting
vista. A moment later; "It's a close squeeze. See there, past the
horizon--a prominence?"
It was like a white plume, this jet of vapor thrown far into space. Not
uncommon in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere. But it was bright, dazzling!
That meant they were not far from the sunlight!
"Pull away!" the fat mathematician shouted. "We have to take a chance!"
Instantly Sine reversed the lever. Everyone grasped handholds as the
ship backed out of the pit. Now they could see the vast ruin they had
wrought. Sine gave her all the speed he dared, for the sun, for home!
The great ruin was slowly turning, and in a few minutes they saw again
the darker shadow that was the fighting patrol ship, still clamped to
her side. At the same instant the dull red pinpoint winked on. The
Jovians had sighted them again! In a few minutes the hull was getting
uncomfortably warm.
Lents laid down his pad.
"They will crash!" he declared. "But they have an hour, the fools!
Instead of trying to burn us why don't they get into their space suits
and free themselves?"
Jan, resting on the bench, shook his shaggy head.
"They are a great people, stupid but great. They will try to punish us
till they die."
The wreckage drifted closer and closer to Jupiter, and still the red
beam played steadily on the fleeing prisoners' ship. The distance had
become so great that it could only be seen through an old telescope
that the prisoners had somehow procured. But the prisoners were
gasping. Their hull was cherry-red on the outside, and still heating. A
few more minutes and the heat would be unbearable.
"They are getting closer--closer--they are in the sunlight. Now I can
see better. I believe they will skip by--no! They've dived into the
vapor! They're out again. Skipped out like a flat stone on water.
Sinking again--almost over the horizon. Gone, I guess. Whew, it's hot!"
They were accelerating so fast that they had to turn on the interior
gravity buttons to equalize the pressure on their bodies. Behind lay the
vast, fog-bound planet of Jupiter. Ahead was the beautiful sun. And
somewhere beyond, and still invisible, Earth the lovely, the green, the
Mother of the human race!
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Metal Moon, by Everett C. Smith and R.F. Starzl
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