by Earl
FROM the highest tower of ETBI, situated on Long Island, the view was magnificent. Far to the west could be seen the spires of Manhattan, Earth’s largest and busiest city, the beating heart of man’s empire in the skies. Closer, on Long Island itself, lay Tellus Space Port, with its gigantic drome and hangars and its widespread landing field.
Great liners and freighters rocketed up and thundered down constantly. The bull roars of their powerful engines could be heard as a steady low undertone, like the beating of an endless surf.
“The crossroads of space meet there!” murmured Dr. Rodney Shelton to his laboratory assistant, Myra Benning. She nodded.
It was a scene to inspire that thought, as the docks and quays of old London, a century before had been the crossroads of the high seas. All the rich and varied commerce of other worlds entered at this hub of the Solar Empire. Not a day passed but what new treasure came out of the void—precious and useful metals, priceless jewels, exotic food staffs rare or unknown to Earth. This besides the steady dealing in Venusian grains and meats, and the Martian manufactures.
At times, the breath of adventure wafted from the spaceways—tales of hidden lands on alien worlds, fabulous creatures and heroic deeds. In that sense it was like the Venice of the Middle Ages, with its early Teachings into Cathay and India and the mysterious South Seas. Only here it was the traversing of etheric trails to Mars and Ganymede and Rhea.
And there was a frontier—Saturn—beyond which organized enterprise had not yet advanced. It was a mixture of the prosaic and romantic, as with all such pioneering periods, and no one could say what the morrow might bring.
The two watchers from the tower drank in the scene, finding a moment of relaxation from their intense laboratory routine below.
Dr. Rodney Shelton was under thirty and over six feet, as lithely built as an athlete. One noticed his strong chin, firm lips and straight nose, but mostly his eyes. They were the steady, calm gray eyes of the dreamer and thinker, but in their depths lurked a certain quality, keenly alive, that marked him a man of action when the occasion demanded.
He did not look, outwardly, the scientist he was. But the wrinkles of concentration could appear in an instant on his forehead, when the brain behind it delved into a knotty problem.
Beside him, Myra Benning was wholly feminine, despite her shapeless laboratory smock and the lack of cosmetic artifices. She had the natural beauty equipment of pert nose, gold-sheen hair and soft blue eyes. But more than that, she had a mind, and a corresponding ambition to utilize it. She had chosen science as a career.
Suddenly both looked up, startled, as the shrill blast of sirens sounded from the direction of Tellus Space Port. The sirens were seldom used. It meant an emergency of some kind. Sometimes crippled ships, for instance, needed the port cleared for a dangerous landing.
Dr. Shelton and Myra could see ships hastily wheeling away, postponing take-off. One small freighter, about to settle for a landing, nosed up again with a revved blast of its under tubes, to circle and await its time.
A FEW minutes later the cause of the disturbance appeared—a long, torpedo-shaped craft that dropped almost precipitately from the clouds. Steam hissed from a hull that had been heated by rapid descent through Earth’s air envelope. The under tubes flamed a cherry red, smoothing the fall, but the ship landed bouncingly on its undercarriage and rolled forward a hundred yards before retarding blasts halted it. Then the volcanic throb of its engines ceased, abruptly.
The air-lock of the landed craft jerked open. Hurrying officials from the drome met the flyers coming out. Excitement pulsed in the air. To Rodney Shelton and his companion, it was like a play being enacted on a faraway stage. The figures were tiny toys.
“Wonder what that’s all about?” mused the man. “They’ve come from somewhere in a big hurry.” He leaned forward, straining his eyes. “Looks like an exploration ship, by the size of its fuel hold. Can’t make out the name.”
“Exploration ship!” Myra Benning caught her breath. “My brother Hugh is with the Tycho—” She shook her head. “But that isn’t due back for three weeks yet. It wouldn’t be Hugh’s ship.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “We’ve been up here a half hour,” she stated crisply. “I think we’d better go down now, Dr. Shelton.”
“You’re like the voice of my conscience,” the man grinned. “But you’re right—back to work!”
They left the tower to descend to their laboratory.
The builders of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 had called it the “World of Tomorrow.” They would have been utterly amazed, however, to see what reared on those same grounds a century later.
To the eye, it was simply a group of giant, windowless buildings; the conditioning chambers of ETBI—Extra-Terra Bio-Institute. But within them, in sealed cubicles, were a hundred varieties of temperature, pressure, lighting, and the other strange conditions of extra-terrestrial environments. It was a large-scale biological project that had meant much in Earth’s colonization of the planets.
One building was devoted solely to Martian conditioning. Men and women emerged from there with bodies whose metabolism was suited perfectly to Martian environment, with its utterly dry, wispy air, freezing climate, and light gravity. They were taken to Mars in specially conditioned space ships, a steady stream of them.
Mars had been the first to be colonized. Already the resident population of Earth people on the Red Planet was over five million. A dozen industries thrived there. Beautiful ceramics from Martian clay were much in demand on Earth. And the exquisitely fine cloths from Martian spider webs.
Another building conditioned colonists to withstand the torrid dampness of Venus, ten times as trying to humans as the hottest jungles of Africa or South America. These people reaped tremendous harvests of the Cloudy Planet’s boundless fertility. Crops ripened in a short month in the hot, steamy plains that stretched endlessly under veiled skies. Imported grains from Earth grew in riotous abundance. More than half of Earth’s staple food supplies came from the rich farms of Venus.
ALL this would have been impossible to normal, unconditioned Earth people. They would have had to labor in sealed suits against adverse environment, with all the insurmountable handicaps of such methods. But with people whose metabolism had been altered to fit the new conditions, they lived and breathed as freely as though born on those planets.
But how had human metabolism, the stabilized result of millions of years of evolution on Earth, been changed? In the final analysis, it all centered about the use of one remarkable product of biological science, developed twenty-five years before.
It was called, for the press and public, just “adaptene,” but only the most trusted officials of the Institute knew what it was by formula. By its very nature, it had to be shrouded in secrecy and kept from the hands of unscrupulous individuals. The Earth Union Government controlled exclusively the manufacture and use of adaptene.
Adaptene was the parent substance of all hormones in the living body. It controlled all metabolism, and therefore all the body processes to the last one.
Most remarkable of the applications of this near-miraculous substance had been the conquest of Jupiter’s inimical environment. It had seemed impossible at first. At Jupiter’s surface was a crushing gravity, almost three times that of Earth, that made human bones and muscles crack in a few hours.
A moisture-choked heat, from the Titanic layers of pressing gases, promised constantly parched throats and slowly boiling skin. Worst of all, the atmosphere itself was laden with gases, besides oxygen, never meant for earthly lungs—methane, ammonia, and even traces of searing bromine that exuded from volcanic sources and gave the whole atmosphere its brownish tinge.
The natural life-forms of Jupiter’s wild environment were adapted by millions of years of evolution. How could Earthmen, nurtured in a gentler climate, meet that terrible challenge?
It was tried. A series of conditioning rooms had been prepared, with successively greater air
pressure, heat and foreign gases. In a way, it was like the Twentieth Century compression chambers, which had been used to prepare divers for the great pressures under the sea. Three Earthmen, given strong doses of adaptene, had gone from chamber to chamber. Leaden suits were prepared for them and weight added day by day. Their metabolism had faithfully undergone the necessary changes!
At the end of three months, they had reached the final conditioning room, which practically duplicated Jupiter’s conditions. Their skins had become tough and heat-resisting. Their lungs filtered out methane, ammonia and bromine automatically, retaining only the necessary oxygen. Their muscles, motivated by superactive adrenalin, easily supported five hundred pounds of weight without tiring. All this through the magic touch of adaptene, working in its mysterious way throughout every cell and vein.
The men had been sent to Jupiter. One of them succumbed to the continued harshness of life there, but the other two survived. With this proof of success, other men were bio-conditioned, and soon a settlement was founded and work begun to extract the chemical riches of Jupiter’s soil.
Now, in 2050 A.D., bio-conditioned Earthmen were to be found on ten different worlds of the Solar System—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Saturn and Titan. Adaptene had burst the former bonds of the narrow range of conditions under which the human body could survive.
It did not matter whether the atmosphere was thin or thick, whether life-supporting oxygen was scarce or overabundant, whether frigid cold or suffocating heat existed, whether the force of gravity was weak or bruisingly powerful—adaptene made metabolic corrections for all variations.
They were still humans, these made-over colonists on other worlds. Science had changed their bodies somewhat, but not their minds. They lived and loved and worked in alien surroundings with as much of the measure of well being and happiness as came to Earth-living humans. Their children were easily bio-conditioned from birth onward by adaptene. It was only the start, but colonization was rapidly gaining momentum toward a great empire in which Earth people lived on all the worlds of the Solar System’—by the virtue of adaptene.
ETBI, where the bio-conditioning was carried on, was a separate branch of the Earth Union Government, along with the Space Navy. Interplanetary Exploration and Planetary Survey Bureaus. The exploitation of space was a highly organized process.
First the ships of the exploration service mapped and explored, on any new world. Then the Planetary Survey experts tabulated all raw resources, mineral and otherwise. The Space Navy stepped in next, to establish outposts and fueling stations.
Finally ETBI sent its tailored, permanent colonists to dig in and develop the planet. And a new world had been added to man’s growing roster!
CHAPTER III
Mystery from the Spaceways
THE heart of Extra-Terra Bio-Institute was its controlling laboratory system, whose activities ran the entire scale of science. Its staff numbered thousands. Its facilities were ultra-modern. It was the clearing house of all data brought back from the spaceways. On file was every conceivable bit of information relating to extra-terrestrial matters.
The head of ETBI was a cabinet member of the Earth Union Government. Second in command was Dr. Rodney Shelton, youngest and most brilliant of the scientific staff.
His career had been studded with vital researches. Even before coming to ETBI, his graduation thesis as a student had settled once and for all the virus-enigma, unsolved for a century. He proved that the viruses were molecular Life-forms, the link between mineral and living states. Thus tagged, all virus diseases were curable, including the common “cold,” by treating them with artificial anti-virus molecules, as though they were simply chemical reagents.
But, joining the staff of ETBI, Shelton had turned his attention to the mysteries of extra-terrestrial biology. He had been with the famed Venus Swampland Expedition, commissioned to study the terrible brain-softening plague that periodically swept out from the swamplands to wipe out whole communities of Earth settlers.
Isolating the germ, Shelton had studied it at great risk alone—at his own insistence. He passed out his notes from a sealed-off cubicle of the ship. He lived in a sealed suit and did not dare eat or drink. In a week, he came out, thin and weak, but happy—with the answer.
The brain-softening bacteria died promptly in blue light, unknown on Venus because of its cloud-packed skies that filtered out all blue radiation. Thereafter, all Earth settlements were simply protected, when the plague reared, by rings of blue searchlights.
On Mercury, Shelton had found a much simpler way of stopping the voracious hordes of omnivorous, two-foot amoeboids than by blasting them to pieces with small cannon. No poison could affect them. Small gelatin capsules containing solid carbon dioxide were strewn in their stampeding path. The giant single-celled monsters absorbed them, dissolved off the gelatin, and swiftly puffed up into porous balloons by the action of released gas. In this form, they were whisked into the sky by the stiff winds, like bubbles, and eventually dashed to smears against rocks and cliffs.
But on Mars, Shelton had met, and conquered, the most baffling problem of them all. What could one do against invisible swarms of spongy germs that roamed the wastes of that planet and soaked up every last particle of water, to convert it into more spongy germs? The least exposure of a water supply would let them in, to fill it with their multiplying legions.
Shelton impregnated the normal water with one per cent of heavy-water, easily manufactured on Earth from deuterium, “heavy” isotopic hydrogen, and oxygen. By Mendelian principles, applicable to all life, whether on Earth, Mars or Andromeda, the hundredth or so generation of the sponge-germs were unable to breed.
Shelton remembered that back in the 1930’s the law had been laid down that heavy water inhibited reproductive processes. The sponge germ ceased to peril the water supplies of Earth colonists.
BUT in the past three years, Shelton’s responsibilities had been shifted entirely to the most important of ETBI’s activities—the bio-conditioning. He was one of the trusted few who knew the chemical formula of adaptene, and was always in complete charge of every new bio-conditioning venture engaged in by ETBI.
Before his transfer to that project, bio-conditioning had been clumsy, taking months. Shelton’s researches enabled the process to be cut down to weeks. He had thereby tripled the colonization rate of the other bodies of the System. . . .
“Well, the conditioning of men for Rhea is about done,” said Shelton, in relief. He and his assistant were in their laboratory, after having seen the excitement of an emergency landing at the port. “Another score for ETBI, and for adaptene! It’s laboratory evolution, in a way!”
“Yes, Dr. Shelton.”
Myra Benning slipped microscope slides into a cleansing bath of alcohol. Surreptitiously, however, she was watching his face. It was an interesting face to watch, with its glow of inspired feelings. It was the face of a leader and organizer, one whose mark would be left in the history of man’s conquest of space. But to Myra Benning, it was also just the face of—a man.
“Let’s see”—Shelton was counting on his fingers—“that’s the eleventh world outside of Earth to which ETBI has sent its graduates. Iapetus will be next, to make it an even dozen. That will be soon now.” His eyes glowed, as one who envisions ever greater horizons. “Exploring and mineral survey have gone on for several years. They’ll want bio-conditioned men soon, when the Navy has established an outpost. It’s like clockwork! World after world!”
The opti-phone bell rang.
Shelton snapped the “on” stud. The bewhiskered, jowled face of Grant Beatty, director of ETBI, flashed on the milky screen. One of the six men who, under the Earth Union’s president, ruled the spaceways, his forceful personality reflected from a habitually grave face. Iron-gray hair framed his piercing eyes and thin, firm lips. But his expression was more than just grave at the moment; it was tense.
“Shelton,” he barked out of the spe
aker, “drop whatever you’re doing. Something vital has just come up. We’ve got an assignment that sounds more important than anything we’ve tackled before. The space ship Tycho just docked, emergency landing.”
“The exploration ship?” queried Shelton, glancing at his assistant to see her head swing up sharply. “The one that went to Saturn for an official survey of Iapetus ore?”
“That’s it!” corroborated the director. He went on slowly, biting off the words incisively: “It’s back with only two men alive out of ten!”
Myra Benning’s hand went to her throat, but she said nothing. Shelton had to admire the way she waited calmly for the rest, though her own brother might be one of the victims.
Shelton was shaking his head. It always hurt to hear of brave men meeting doom out in the spaceways—young, spirited men who had much to live for. Some of them were important, too; scientists, technicians. Now they were martyrs to mankind’s steady march toward complete dominion of the Solar System.
“TWO alive and the rest dead!” Shelton muttered. “On Iapetus—the next colony world on our list. What happened up there on Iapetus?” He shrank from asking which men were dead, with Myra Benning’s horrified eyes on him.
“No, not dead!” boomed Director Beatty, going back to the first thing Shelton had said.
Shelton stared. “But you just said that there were only two alive—”
“Yes, but the others are not dead!” Beatty insisted. “I had a look at the bodies. They aren’t alive; they aren’t dead!” His eyes looked shocked, as though he had seen the incredible. “And that’s our job, Shelton; finding out what it means. Come to the hospital ward at once. The bodies have been brought here.”
“I’ll be over in a moment.” Shelton switched off the phone. “Steady now!” he said to the girl.
He slipped off his stained smock and wrestled into his coat. As he stepped to the door, he found her waiting to go along.
