Then, for the first time in days, confident of herself, Lucille Roman lifted the ship and jockeyed it toward the foremost of the mob. They broke and scattered before those searing jets.
They broke and ran for cover and fell as they ran, seared with the torrent of heat that spilled from the jets that roasted the air near them, and so heated the concrete that it was powdery when it had cooled again.
Big Ed fell back and tilted the barrel. It rolled forward under the ship’s wavering course and exploded with a deafening roar. Lucille’s ship was hurled upward jerkily, to catch itself and remain poised ten feet higher than before.
But steel and concrete flew from the top of the slab and shards of debris rained down in the crowd.
Lucille aimed the tail of her ship at them once more and they broke, racing headlong for shelter. They left Lichty and his crew tied to the steel railing at the far edge of the vast concrete enclosure at one side of the dam.
Knowing that the mob would not return as long as the ship remained in the vicinity, Lucille dropped to the enclosure and opened the spacelock as quickly as she could. She released the dam crew and then, with them, raced back to the spacelock.
“Wait,” said Lichty.
“For what?” she asked breathlessly.
Lichty smiled sourly. “Were not going anywhere.”
“But they’ll come back.”
Lichty shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Mobs aren’t like that. They have little determination. Remember, you’re not too far from the state where they used to send just one Ranger to quell one riot. They’re broken now and pretty soon good sense and shame will come to them and they’ll be sorry for having made idiots of themselves.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“We’ve got jobs to do, even though it may not be long. We’ll stay.”
“But-”
“We’ll find Big Ed. We can explain to him and let him take care of the others. Now—”
Lichty was interrupted by a faint voice calling from the edge of the clearing. He turned quizzically, then went toward the far gate. Slowly, overcautiously perhaps, Lucille Roman followed Lichty and his crew, wondering what kind of man could walk into such danger without a qualm.
The cry was augmented by two fainter cries. She came up to Lichty, who was bending down over someone on the ground. Two men stood by, a child in each man’s arms.
The woman on the ground looked up weakly. “You!” she breathed in a bitterly accusing voice that held as much hatred as her pain-filled body would permit her. “You did this!”
“No!” cried Lucille.
The woman obviously did not hear. “You did this,” she said again, more faintly this time.
Lichty stood up and shook his head. “Hit with a shard of the nitro barrel,” he said.
“You did this,” repeated the hurt woman. Her voice was a dry cackle and she tried to raise herself, to raise a hand, to point an accusing finger.
Lucille shook her head again. How could she tell this woman that she was not to blame? How could she explain to a woman grievously hurt that she, too, was but an innocent bystander to a cosmic catastrophe so large that the antics of man and his highest achievements were but a single mote of dust by comparison.
“Who is she?” asked Lucille, at a loss for words but feeling the necessity of saying something.
Lichty shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“But we must do something.”
Lichty shook his head. “Someone’s wife,” he said in a soft voice. “Curious—perhaps seeking a thrill. She came to watch and remained to die.”
“Die!” screamed the woman. A burst of energy roused her and she sat up by sheer effort. She leaned back against one of Lichty’s men and looked into Lucille’s eyes.
“You did this!” she cried. “You killed—” She never finished.
The last ebbing force of her life was spent in anger and hatred. She died hating Lucille Roman, and her face was twisted in helpless rage when Lichty’s man put her tom body back on the concrete and covered it with his jacket. A rip in the jacket, tom by one of the mob, came over her hand and the fingers thrust through and writhed faintly, opening and closing.
Lucille covered her eyes and turned away. -
A childish wail caught her ear and she dropped her hands to look. Children, two of them, one in each of two men’s arms, were trying to get free and run to their mother.
Dourly, for tenderness did not come easily to the hydroelectric crew, Lichty led the way from the gate back to the spacecraft. He ignored the childish shrieks as his men tried to soothe the two children.
“What’ll we do with them?” asked Lichty.
“I’ll take them,” said Lucille.
“Why? What can you do?”
Lucille shrugged. Her mouth was dry.
“I did it,” she said in a low voice.
“Don’t be—”
“I’ll help them,” she said. “Who are they?”
“They were Jimmy Norberg’s kids.”
“Were?”
“Norberg was unhappy. When the nova was announced he decided that he had worked hard and long enough. He drew his dough from the bank and went on a binge until it was gone. The day after that he shot himself.”
“Leaving her alone,” added Lucille in a hard voice. She looked at Lichty and then at the twins. A boy and a girl, about four years old. A boy and a girl with a normal life expectancy of another sixty years.
A boy and a girl who might be the new Adam and Eve on some distant planet. A pair who would be in the prime of their lives by the time the awesome crossing was completed and who could be trained not to suffer the terrors of yearlong spaceflight in a tiny metal ship. A pair trained to carry on the civilization started here near Sol.
“I’ll take them,” she said firmly. “Maybe, instead of having in my hands the cause of the earth’s death, I will control the future of mankind!”
CHAPTER XIV
Jeff Benson’s eyes widened a bit when Lucille Roman carried two children into his apartment and placed them gently on his broad bed.
“They’re dead tired,” she explained. She dropped into the easy chair beside the bed and put her head back and looked at the ceiling.
“You’re tired, too,” he said quietly.
“Not so terribly,” she started. She sat up but Jeff put his hand on her forehead and shoved her back gently.
“What’s the story?” he asked.
“I seem to owe you a lot,” she said.
“Nothing,” he told her.
“I’m free. Isn’t that something?”
“Only a matter of fact. You did nothing.”
“I used the jet.”
“So? That did nothing.”
“Maybe it started the whole thing.”
Jeff shook his head. He explained_what he knew and took her then to his laboratory where he showed her the tube connecting the universe with sub-space.
“This is a well-controlled orifice,” he said with a smile, “This is no mere rupture nor even a clean puncture. It’s more of a well or valve that can be used at will.
“No, Lucille, the nova was the means of discovery of the jet, and the jet is not the cause of the nova. Which brings us to you. Just what have you in mind for the kids? And what are you going to do with them?”
Lucille looked up at him hopefully. Her face was wan, pale, devoid of the usual makeup, but her eyes were bright. “This is not for me,” she said softly. “It’s for them. You told me that we could not live out the journey to another star.” “We couldn’t.”
“But they could!” said Lucille proudly.
Jeff shook his head and smiled tolerantly. He put a gentle hand on hers and said softly, “They have the life expectancy,” he said. “But—”
“So we can take them and take care of them until they are able to handle themselves. Then, when we die, they can go on.”
Jeff shook his head again. “No go,” he said. “There is the m
atter of supplies. Even granting some unknown means of sending them out alone, there wouldn’t be enough.” He thought for a moment.
“And even if we had clockwork to feed them regularly and machines to take care of their every physical need, they would eventually end up by just going on and on and on through space until they died.
“For you see, Lucille, the ship would be their life to them and they might find a planet terrifying and hostile compared to the closed-in comfort of the spacecraft. They could never survive alone.”
“There must still be some way,” she said.
Jeff looked into the mouth of his tube. “Maybe there is,” he said softly. “But I’ve yet to find it.”
Lucille looked up at him again. “For them, Jeff?” she pleaded. “Can I help?”
“You?”
Jeff was interrupted by a muted roar from the back of the building. It was a strange roar to him but Lucille stiffened at the sound and put her hands to her throat.
“The ship!” she cried in a choked voice.
“The what?”
“My ship. That roar was the jets!”
Jeff led the way out through the back door. The air was warm, acrid, still skirling crazily. High in the sky was a tiny circle of too-brilliant dots. The diameter of the circle dwindled as they watched.
“My ship,” moaned Lucille, pointing up. She turned to Jeff, her filled with pain and misery. “Can I do nothing right? Must everything be wrong?”
She swayed and Jeff caught her. She sobbed against his shoulder for a moment and then straightened a bit “Now,” she said brokenly, “I have nothing left.”
Jeff smiled tolerantly, sympathetically. “You can help me,” he told her. He never realized that he was piling the proverbial coals of fire upon the head of one who had treated him so shabbily in the past.
But Lucille Roman did. She choked, swallowed and remembered that she had never offered anything in her life without anticipating some reward greater than what she offered. The days of weariness and strain and fear mingled with her emotion, and once more she swayed toward Jeff. He caught her gently.
“Jeff!” she said in a thick, dry voice.
“Tell me tomorrow,” he said softly. He scooped her up and carried her inside.
Jeff went down to his laboratory to work and he carried with him the picture of her wan face, her eyes closed in sleep. Lucille slept with one arm around each of the twins in Jeff’s large bed.
Charles Horne exulted in the performance of the spaceship for hours after lifting it from behind Jeff’s laboratory. He put it through its paces high in the stratosphere, paying no immediate attention to the air that screamed out of the punctures in his hull.
Then, realizing that they must be fixed, Horne took his stolen ship north into Minnesota, where he had a summer cottage beside a lake. From a nearby railroad siding and freight yard Horne stole an acetylene welding outfit and spent a day or so experimenting with it until he had mastered the rudiments of aluminum welding.
He sealed up most of the holes he could see, took the ship high in the air until it had driven quite a bit of air from the inside. Then he dropped it into the lake and went around on the inside, marking trickles of water driven into the ship by the lowered air pressure. By the afternoon of the fourth day he was quite adept with the welding outfit and he spent most of the evening rewelding some of his botched earlier efforts.
On the morning of the fifth day Horne was ready to try the first phase of his plan. He took the spacecraft out over the North Atlantic and, armed with a table of commodity sailings, dates and hours and ships and tonnages, Horne located a ship of about five thousand tons that was loaded with grain.
Caring nothing for the superstructure, Horne balanced the ship on its tail until the searing jets scorched the deck paint, curled the steel masts and sent the radio antenna and guy wires flying off in molten droplets. He seared the bridge to a smoldering ruin and the woodwork on the ship’s upper structure blackened and flared away almost instantly.
Seamen on the deck died instantly and more men running up to see what was going on, were met with a jet of atomic flame that killed them in their tracks. For an hour he played around the ship, bathing it with the fierce atomic radiation from his jets until he was certain that any man below deck must be dead.
Then Horne dropped the spacecraft on top of the mined ship, nestling it in the hollow of the blackened superstructure. He spent hours fastening the spacecraft to the vessel with cables and chain from the ship’s stores.
With a prayer of hope Horne set the power high and watched.
Spacecraft and surface ship moved forward, the seagoing ship nosing down because the thrust was high above the water. Horne increased the power and the ships moved more swiftly. Horne put power on the lower set of jets and the noses of the ships went up slightly
He increased his power more and the surface vessel moved through the water faster than it had ever been intended to. It lifted, then skimmed, then touched only crests. Finally Horne turned the nose of his spacecraft up into the sky.
Still dripping water, the ocean-going vessel left the surface of the sea and rose high in the sky.
Gaining speed, Horne headed for space.
Free of terra a few hours later, Horne consulted his sky maps. He located Procyon easily and headed toward the star with as high an acceleration as the Roman Spacecraft could develop.
Terra was lost behind in the sky by the time Horae cut the seagoing vessel loose. Its velocity was far above the escape velocity for both Sol and terra. It would, hour after hour, day after day, perhaps year after year, plow through the silent black sky toward Procyon, its cargo preserved by the airlessness of space. When they picked it up again, be it days or years away, the grain would be in good condition.
No single hull could hold the food and supplies needed for a trip across the void to another star.
But many hulls, laden with food and water and air—meat and vegetables and starches, tobacco and liquor, clothing and games and books and tools and medicines—hull after hull wrested from the ocean of earth and hurled into the sky— would do the trick. Some would be lost, but most could be located by radar and ultimately taken along.
Not that Horne hoped to get any ships off early enough to have them picked up near the end of the long trek. But once they were removed, one by one, from the grasp of terran gravity he planned to chain them together in deep space. Hauling them along would be duck pie.
True, the total mass might be staggering in quantity and the resulting acceleration reduced to a mere crawl but a few moments with pencil and paper showed him that an acceleration one one-hundredth that of terran gravity could result in amazing velocities when continued over a period of time.
Let men laugh at the impossibility of crossing space to the stars!
Horne glowed inwardly as he saw the first of his supply train vanish into sky. He swapped ends with the spacecraft and started to decelerate in order to return to earth. It took a rare combination of brains and ruthlessness to survive, and man—in the person of Charles Horne—was fit.
It was a mild winter. The initial chill of autumn faded into what should have been cold weather but the increasing activity of Sol kept the temperature well above freezing even though the calendar read December. The southern hemisphere reported a vicious summer and, as winter faded and the early months of spring came, the thermometer took an uprise never before reported.
Sol had an angry look. Intolerable to the eye unless viewed through special glasses or glass covered with soot, Sol bore down hotly in an angry sky. Sol could be viewed directly through thick glass or by projecting his image on a wall or sheet of white paper through a pinhole or a long-focus lens.
Then the myriad sunspots could be seen, and their opposite spots of searing brightness could be viewed in boiling motion somewhat like bright metal breaking through the slag in the melting pot of a foundry.
The Aurora played nightly and ruined most radio transmission, completely d
isrupted any attempts at television communication and often tied up the land wires for hour upon hour. Magnetic devices acted strangely and ships at sea wandered with aimless compasses on cloudy days and stormy nights. Only under clear skies could they hold course.
People worked doggedly and only enough to keep themselves alive. Gone was ambition—planning for the future seemed useless.
Late in March Lucille Roman awoke from a night of fitful slumber. It was unbearably hot, and lightning flickered along the horizon constantly to the muttering of distant thunder.
Lucille was drenched in perspiration and she wanted a cigarette. She rose quietly, without wakening the twins, went into the bathroom and showered. She emerged from the shower and looked around the living room for a smoke.
Jeff was not asleep on the studio couch—therefore he must be working and would have cigarettes.
She went downstairs.
Jeff stood before the great tunnel into sub-space, watching the performance of a small betatron that hurled its cone of hard gamma into the mouth of the tunnel. He was engrossed and did not hear Lucille enter. She understood his concentration and found a cigarette from the package on the desk behind him. She lit it and sat down on the desk quietly.
She watched him for fully a half hour. Jeff stood immobile most of the time, moving only when something required adjustment or needed checking. He copied few notes but consulted the back pages of his notebook regularly.
Lucille guessed correctly that Jeff was rechecking an important point of his endless experimentation.
Somewhere out through that tunnel, Jeff hoped to find a future for the human race, a means of survival for their own species.
Jeff finished and snapped off the equipment.
“Luck, Jeff?” she asked.
He turned. She saw from the cut of his shoulders and the haggard look on his face that all the luck he had was bad.
“Well?”
“It’s no use,” he said.
“What happened?”
Jeff looked once more into the tunnel, inoperative now. He shook his head. “That is an utterly alien universe out there,” he told her. “It is impenetrative.”
Fire in the Heavens (1958) Page 13
