by Earl
They heard the roar and hiss of infantry guns at the north end of the city for those three days, and then all became tomblike again, as befitted this corpse of a city. They went on with their work.
Elson went out foraging for food with Lorna when the restaurant supply gave out. Luckily, they stumbled on a tortuous entrance among heaped blocks of stone that led to what had been the bargain basement of a department store. There they found large stores of canned foods that ended their worries on that question.
The anti-weapon that Professor Davidson had built in his laboratory gradually took form on the nose of Elson’s ship. The pilot ripped out the wires that came from his battery supply—for his cabin heating coils—and ran them to the anti-weapon. This would give it the necessary small supply of electrical power to start its functions. After that its self-inductance coils would operate it independently. The batteries were charged from an auxiliary of the rocket motors.
Elson had repaired his ship as far as he was able. The left wing seemed staunch enough to hold up under cruising flight. The front rockets’ jammed distributor yielded to his experienced touch. He patched the ragged holes in top and bottom of the cabin with the emergency cloth-tape. Of rocket fuel, gasoline, and solidified air cubes, he had plenty for an average cruise.
Everything was set. It was almost a month since Elson had landed at the airport with his crippled ship. It seemed like a dream at times—that he could be engaged in this almost fantastic venture. Allied with citizens of the Other Side. His every move a treason against His Side.
El son made his way from the airport to the laboratory in his usual wary fashion. At times he had spied the figures of patrolling soldiers in the distance. It would not do to meet them and be questioned.
Approaching the basement door, he was about to give the usual cheery call when he heard the rumble of unfamiliar voices within. Elson shrank to the wall, pulling out his alpha-pistol. He crept to the door, put his car to the crack.
“I warn you against resistance,” growled a husky voice. “I have the official military warrant here. All able women arc to serve as nurses at the north garrison. Come along, girlie.”
There was an answering sob from Lorna.
“As for you. grandpaw,” continued the gruff voice, “you better come along and explain what all that monkey business of yours is about. You may be hiding something.”
There was a sound of scuffling and then another uncouth voice. “The captain says you come—so you come, young lady. We’ll treat you nice—we treat them all nice, don’t we, Cap?”
There was the sound of coarse laughter. Elson, shaking so hard with rage that his elbow beat a tattoo on the hard wall at his side, told himself calmly that there had been three voices laughing. Three armed men——
Elson straightened, stepped before the door, opened it soundlessly a couple of inches. Neither of the three uniformed men was turned his way, so for a few seconds he had a chance to see their positions and plan his next move.
lie suppressed a gasp. The men’s uniforms were of His Side! This sector and city had changed hands! Professor Davidson, directly facing the door, had seen it move, but gave no sign save a narrowing of his eyes.
Elson pulled the door open another few inches. This time Corna saw it, gasped, and flung her hand toward her mouth. The soldiers whirled, just as Elson swung the door wide.
He triggered in a lightning motion, at the same time that he twisted and ducked. His alpha-charge tore squarely through one of the men. hurling him back as a corpse. The other private’s return shot blasted over El son’s left shoulder. The pilot’s next shot took him in the hip and spun him against the wall. The captain had drawn by this time and Elson knew he could not escape the shot.
An alpha-charge blasted—but it was the captain who fell with his heart drilled. Lorna dropped her smoking pistol and turned to her father’s arms. A last charge hissed out from Elson’s gun, taking the life of the wounded soldier who had been aiming for him from the floor.
Elson strode up to them, his deadly fighting smile gone. “Thanks. Lorna,” he breathed. “That took real courage. Don’t feel bad because you’ve killed a man. It was them or us.”
Lorna turned, dashing tears from her eves, and smiled. “You were courageous. Dick. You killed them knowing they were men of Your Side!”
Professor Davidson muttered to himself. “Three lives to save millions. Not a bad bargain.”
AS THE SUN sank, clothing the shards of a city in merciful gloom, Elson drew on his gloves and stood within the door of his cabin.
“Good luck!” said Professor Davidson imply.
“Au revoir!” breathed Lorna, but her eyes said more.
The tiny ship taxied down the runway and rose like a skimming bird. Within, Elson watched his lighted instrument board carefully. At times he glanced at the left wing anxiously, though he could not see more than its vague outline. It stood the test of the rise for a mile. Elson breathed easier. It was going to hold.
He rose steadily and at ten miles pumped fuel to his rear rockets—leveled out. The drone of the propeller Mopped. Here in the rarefied stratosphere he did not have to worry about the wing. lie scanned the surrounding skies continuously from his circular conning port. If ever he hoped not to meet a patrol, it was now. But not so much the enemy patrol—his own!
Two hours later frost had congealed in the cracks of his door and ports. The wires that should have connected to his heating unit were fastened to the strange looking instrument mounted at the nose of the ship. It was later to perform a hoped-for miracle. Elson stamped his fen and clapped his hands together to help his numbing circulation. He looked below for the lights of a city.
A thousand miles to the northwest he had come, to a region that had preserved strict neutrality. At the outburst of the Atom War, all old-time political boundaries had dissolved. The world had divided into two opposing branches of thought and aim. Certain isolated regions had withdrawn from the general melee. Inevitably they would he engulfed in the holocaust—but at present this city that Elson circled down upon was uncontrolled by either side’s war-machine. The Pacifist League had a local station here.
Elson landed at the lake-shore airport. The officials questioned him and listed him as a deserter from His Side. He was escorted by armed guard to the League’s post. The city was a curious paradox of armed pacifism. They expected attack and military occupation any time—from One Side or the Other.
Inside the large colonial-type building that housed the station of the Pacifist League, Elson had some trouble convincing them he must see their chief executive. He waited more than an hour for an audience with Colonel Stanton, chief of the post. At last Elson was ushered into his office and faced a mild-looking bald man with shadowed, worried eyes.
“Dick Elson,” he read from the paper an attendant had left. “Deserted from His Side. Ace pilot arriving in low-wing single fighter. Very good. We can use you in our aerial defense. You will report to——”
“Never mind.” interposed Elson. “I’m here on a different mission than just to escape the war. Look at these.” He pulled a long, bulging envelope from his coat pocket and tossed it on the desk. Mystified, the official opened it and fingered the pages of drawings and typewritten notes, lie looked up quizzically.
“A new weapon of some sort?”
Elson leaned forward, over the desk. “No, an anti-weapon! It was developed by a scientist over a period of ten years. Briefly, it projects a field of force that allows no war weapon to operate within it!”
Colonel Stanton stared. “I’m not a scientist,” lie said slowly, “but frankly, I think it’s impossible.”
“Sure.” said Elson dryly. “Listen! I have a small model of the anti-weapon mounted on my ship. I’m going somewhere in the Western Salient to-night and use it. If it works—you will hear of it. through the soldiers’ grapevine. When you do, and are sure this isn’t some crackpot stunt, pick up the invented at the city. I came from and rush him and those plans to yo
ur League’s main headquarters. In the meantime—guard them with your life.”
The official shook his bald head slowly. “You don’t look crazy, but you talk crazy. Hut that’s a fair proposition. Heaven knows, such an antiweapon would be a godsend.” The man’s deep-set eyes shone with soul mi-cry as he went on. “Mankind has gone mad in this terrible war. Civilization is crumbling. It must he stopped. Another year or two of this——”
He sprang to his feet. “We can’t afford to ignore the least little hope. An anti-weapon—Lord!”
“My plane must be refueled, tuned a little,” said Elson. “If you have a war-map. I want to pick out an important front. I must be on my way before dawn.”
Colonel Stanton was already at his phone, harking orders.
DAWN spread a mocking red color over the bitterly contested Western Salient. For a week the two warring parties had hurled the cheap energies of the atom at one another. Troops had been fed into the maw of flaming, rending death in staggering numbers. One or the Other Side would buckle eventually. move back. A month later—when military movements had been completed—a new salient would materialize—then the story would repeat itself, most likely in reversal.
High above, a different Dick Elson than the one who had left this very war-torn spot a month before looked down and saw at once the pitifulness of it—and the maddening futility of it, and all its blundering lack of meaning.
He spied a plane, set his lips grimly. But it bore the same insignia as on his wings and after swooping dose, darted away on some mission. Elson dropped his ship directly over the inferno of No Man’s Land. He leveled at 5.000 feet and swung into an unbanked circle.
Heart heating, he snapped the switch that fed battery current out in the queer machine at the ship’s nose. For a minute nothing happened, as the tubes warmed up. Then a faint shadow grew below the ship and darkened steadily. Five minutes later a cone of deep shadow extended from its apex at the nose of Elson’s ship to the earth below. Its wide spreading base swallowed up the entire Western Salient.
Five minutes passed. Listening intently, Elson was able to detect that the low battle undertone was absent from behind the steady drone of his motor and propeller. He grinned exultantly. Down below something had happened. He wondered just what.
If he had been down there, he would have known. Men were cursing at the phenomenon that first darkened the sky and then made their guns cough and splutter. They did not know that a shroud of ultraspace had settled over them which drained the energies of their weapons. Officers stormed and raved, hut the gun crews could not bring life to the projectors of subatomic artillery. In a sort of vagrant light that struck cold fear in their hearts when it did not change, the two warring forces faced each other in an impotent bewilderment. Later it began to get appreciably colder. It was only part of many strange, impossible things that occurred in that area——
This was not the laboratory projection of ultraspace—heatless, lightless, timeless, drained dry of energy, for in that men would have died, sightless and frozen. It was simply a light touch of ultraspace, hut enough to cancel the fiercer energies of the atomic weapons, rob the sky of much light, and confound the lighting forces entirely.
Elson’s ship circled monotonously, pouring down the shadow from the anti-weapon. Hours later, when his gas fuel ran out, he changed to the rockets. It was difficult to maneuver with this motivation in the dense air, but he stoically bore the strain of his death-grip on the stick.
He had feared eventual discovery and attack by craft flying outside the range of the shadow. Hut to his astonishment, several planes passed near him without seeming to notice. He remembered bow it had hurt his eves to look at the globe of ultraspace in Professor Davidson’s laboratory. Perhaps, he reasoned, light was so strangely distorted near the shadow as to convey no recognizable pattern to human eyes.
Perhaps the whole thing was a dream, too. Dick Elson was not sure about that when—toward dusk of that day—he snapped off the anti-weapon and looked below. The battlefield was as peaceful and static as a drowsing countryside. He winged away, awed at what the instrument had done. To-morrow they might again be at one another’s throats, but the day was coming when dozens—hundreds—of such cones of shadow would lay peaceful fingers on Earth. There could be no war, with the anti-weapon.
ELSON slanted down toward the airport for a landing, nose rockets flaring. The ruins of the city were limned against the stars. Two figures came out of the darkness, one of them petite. He thought of the latter’s tender blue eyes and thrilled within himself. He leveled as the concrete loomed close and waited for the bump of wheels.
But strangely—there was no bump of wheels. Thinking he had lost his undercarriage, Elson tipped the nose down just a bit more in split-second decision. He would have to make a forced landing on the belly of his fuselage. He waited tensely for the grinding scrape and a possible crack-up——
Then suddenly, he knew something was wrong. Something more than just a missing undercarriage. Past his eyes streamed a distortion that made no recognizable picture. Hut one thing struck him forcefully and his brain reeled. He seemed to lie under the concrete runway and looking up through it, as though it were transparent!
Elson jerked the ship up sharply, feeding his tail rockets. Because he hoped it was a tired mind and stinging eyes playing him tricks, he zoomed up, circled, and tried again for the landing. He noticed now that Professor Davidson was waving his arms wildly and shaking his head. Somehow his pose had a forlorn air to it that sent burs of coldness down Elson’s spine.
Elson lowered carefully, at almost stalling speed. He knew exactly when the wheels should touch. Hut they didn’t. He knew exactly when the fuselage should touch. Hut it didn’t. The ship continued sinking, as though the concrete weren’t there!
And then, in a vague sort of way, Elson knew. He remembered that all lay while he had circled above the battlefield, other planes had passed him by, as though he hadn’t been there. As though he had been merely a ghostly sort of image which the passing pilots had credited to optical illusion——
Elson knew that was what they had thought—because he himself had seen those other planes only as ghostly images!
And the city ruin that swept by him as he rose again—it, too, was but a phantom scene, tenuous and half transparent. He hadn’t quite believed his eyes before. Professor Davidson and Lorna stood there like wraiths of another world, watching the wraith that was himself and his ship. Elson knew, with a chilling positiveness, that he would never be able to land at the airport, nor anywhere on Earth!
One thing bothered him now. Would Professor Davidson realize what had happened? Would he correct the error in his projector for the Pacifist officials when they arrived to take him to their factories? So that the anti-weapon would not send more pilots to this unknown doom?
Down below, Professor Davidson was saying. “The anti-weapon, draining away the energies of the battlefield, also drained away most of his substance, because he was so near it. He has been projected into that other space—into the ultraspace! I can correct it—add a grounding unit to dissipate that secondary drain. But I didn’t know—and Elson—is doomed!”
With a little moan. Lorna drew into her father’s arms. “I know, I know’ !” he said comfortingly. Then he watched the phantom plane as for the third time it came down, utterly silent. It came close and stopped, hovering somehow in that other space. Elson’s wraithlike figure leaned out of the cabin, with a question on his face. Professor Davidson nodded. Elson saluted in understanding and glanced once at the sobbing girl, face drawn.
Then his rugged face grinned. He waved once and drew back into the cabin. Silently, the ghostly plane arose and faded into the dark night.
VIA ASTEROID
Mars Expedition Number One Survives the Frigid Wastes of an Alien World for Eight Hundred and Three Days! And Then—
HELLO, Earth! Mars Expedition Number One resuming contact with Earth, via Mars etherline. Seven hundred and ninety-first
day. Gillway speaking. Your message requesting code contact, in place of the click-signal, was received yesterday, and today I hooked up all available batteries. Hope this is going through to you.
We certainly are overjoyed to establish code contact once again. In fact, we went wild when your message came in yesterday. The Martian year is a long one. We have been once around the sun, while Earth has circled it twice, since we last exchanged messages. Fred Markers has computed that just eleven months ago we were 260,000,000 miles apart. The thought alone was rather frightening.
The 791 Earth-days value is another of Markers’ calculations. He requests a check on that—wants to satisfy his own curiosity. He figured that Earth’s International Dateline shifted across the Martian meridian twice: at opposition two years ago and at conjunction a year ago. His other values are: 740 Earth-days for the time we’ve been on Mars; 721 Martian-days for the same. Thus the coming opposition will occur fifty days from now. Is he right?
There is much to tell. First of all, I’ll say that the seven of us—Alado is dead—are in good health and feel like native Martians. But we haven’t renounced Earth. In fact, we are at present busily engaged in manufacturing rocket fuel for the return trip. My last report, made almost two years ago, stated that our ship was a ruined tangle, so I will have to explain.
The situation two years ago was this. The ferocious three-foot ant-creatures had besieged us in our clay house and were attacking each day. Proosett and Cruishank had lost their lives. Our sole defense had been the seleno-cell which we were using to electrocute the enemy. A spark had leaped to our ship and exploded our fuel reserves. Thus we seemed faced with doom—we were automatically marooned, and hemmed in by a numberless enemy.
I must admit now that I had unwittingly painted the picture darker than it was. For, a week later, the situation had changed. Unaccountably, the insects vanished. They simply failed to appear one day, though we had seen legions of them in the hills. We never saw them again. Swinerton, our biologist, reasoned that they were similar to the driver-ants of Earth—warring nomads that never stay in one locale, but march onward steadily.
