The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  Lon swung his axe, head down. Presently he asked Cathy to climb up a ladder and hold a lantern for him. He didn’t need light for the rough work—the burning desert vegetation gave enough for that. But when one wants to make a parabolic reflector by tapping with an axe, one needs light for the finer part of the job.

  * * * *

  In Cetopolis, Carson agitatedly put his records on tape and sent it all off by spacegram. He’d previously reported on Lon Simpson, but now he knew that he was going to die. And he followed his instinct to transmit all his quite useless records, in order that his superiors might realize he had been an admirable employee. It did not occur to him that his superiors might be trying frantically to break his sending beam to demand that he find out how Lon Simpson made his power gadget and how he converted vegetation, before it was too late. They didn’t succeed in breaking his beam, because Carson kept it busy.

  He was true to type.

  Elsewhere, other men were true to type, too. The human population of Cetis Gamma Two was very small. There were less than five thousand people on the planet—all within a hundred miles of Cetopolis, and all now on the night side. The rest of the planet’s land masses scorched and shriveled and burst into flame where the sun struck them. The few small oceans heated and their surfaces even boiled. But nobody saw it. The local fauna and flora died over the space of continents.

  But in the human settlement area, people acted according to their individual natures. Some few ran amok and tried to destroy everything—including themselves—before the blazing sun could return to do it. More sat in stunned silence, waiting for doom. A few dug desperately, trying to excavate caves or pits in which they or their wives or children could be safe.…

  But Lon pounded at his barn roof. He made a roughly parabolic mirror some three yards across. He stripped off aluminum siding and made a connection with the ground. He poured water around that connection. He built a crude multiply twisted device of copper wire and put it in the focus of the parabolic mirror.

  He looked up at the sky. The stars seemed dimmer. He took the copper thing away, and they brightened a little. He carefully adjusted it until the stars were at their dimmest.

  He descended to the ground again. He felt an odd incredulity about what he’d done. He didn’t doubt that it would work. He was simply unable to understand how he’d thought of it.

  * * * *

  “There, darling! Your pets are quite safe!” Rhadampsicus said pleasedly.

  Nodalictha scanned the second planet. It was apparently coated with a metallic covering. But it was not quite like metal. It was misty, like an unsubstantial barrier to light—and to Nodalictha’s penetrating thoughts.

  “I had your male pet,” Rhadampsicus explained tenderly, “set up a power beam link to the ionosphere. With several times the usual degree of ionization—because of the flaring sun—the grounded ionosphere became a Rhinthak screen about the planet. The more active the sun, the more dense the screen. They’ll have light to see by when their side of the planet is toward the sun, but no harmful radiation can get down to them. And the screen will fade away as the sun goes back to its normal state.”

  Nodalictha rejoiced. Then she was a little distressed.

  “But now I can’t watch them!” she pouted. Rhadampsicus watched her gravely. She said ruefully, “I see, Rhadampsicus. You’ve spoiled me! But if I can’t watch them for the time being, I won’t have anything to occupy me. Darling Rhadampsicus, you must talk to me sometimes!”

  He talked to her absorbedly. He seemed to think, however, that discussion of the local solar phenomena was conversation. With feminine guile, she pretended to be satisfied, but presently she went back to her housekeeping. She began to dream of their life when they had returned home, and of the residence they would inhabit there. Presently she was planning the parties she would give as a young matron, with canapés of krypton snow and zenon ice, with sprinklings of lovely red nickel bromide crystals for a garnish—

  * * * *

  The sun rose again, and they lived. It was as if the sky were covered with a thick cloud bank which absorbed the monstrous radiation of a sun now four times its previous diameter and madly changing shape like a monstrous ameba of flame.

  In time the sun set. It rose again. It set. And Cetis Gamma Two remained a living planet instead of being a scorched cinder.

  When four days had gone by and nobody died, the colonists decided that they might actually keep on living. They had at first no especially logical foundation for their belief.

  But Cathy boasted. And she boasted in Cetopolis. Since they were going to keep on living, the conventions required that she return to the planet’s one human settlement and her duties as a beamphone operator. It wasn’t proper for her to stay unchaperoned so long as she and Lon weren’t married yet.

  She had no difficulty with Carson. He didn’t refer to her desertion. Carson had his own troubles. Now that he had decided that he would live, his problems multiplied. The colonists’ barns were filled to capacity with thanar leaves which would pay off their debts to the Company. He began to worry about that.

  Lost without the constant directives from the Company, he had his technicians step up the power in the settlement transmitter. He knew that the screen Lon had put up would stop ordinary spacegram transmission. Even with a tight beam, he could broadcast and receive only at night, when the screen was thinnest. Even so, he had to search out holes in the screen.

  The system didn’t work perfectly—it wasn’t two-way at all, until the Company stepped up the power in its own transmitter—but spacegrams started to get through again.

  Carson smiled in relief. He began to regain some of his old arrogantly bored manner. Now that the Company’s guiding hand was once more with him, nothing seemed as bad as it had been. He was able to report that something had happened to save the colony from extinction, and that Lon Simpson had probably done it.

  In return, he got a spacegram demanding full particulars, and precise information on the devices he had reported Lon Simpson to have made.

  Humbly, Carson obeyed his corporation.

  * * * *

  He pumped Cathy—which was not difficult, because she was bursting with pride in Lon. She confirmed, in detail, the rumor that Lon was somehow responsible for the protective screen that was keeping everybody alive.

  Carson sent the information by spacegram. He was informed that a special Company ship was heading for Cetis Gamma Two at full speed. Carson would take orders from its skipper when it arrived. Meanwhile, he would buy thanar leaf if absolutely necessary, but stall as long as possible. The legal staff of the Trading Company was working on the problem of adapting the system to get the new surplus supplies of thanar without letting anybody get anything in particular for it. He would keep secret the coming of the special ship, which was actually the space yacht of a member of the Board of Directors. And he would display great friendliness toward Lon Simpson.

  The last was the difficult part, because Lon Simpson was becoming difficult. With the sun writhing as if in agony overhead—seen dimly through a permanent blessed mistiness—and changing shape from hour to hour, Lon Simpson had discovered something new to get mad about. Lon had felt definitely on top of the world. He had solved the problem of clearing his debts and getting credit sufficient for two passages back to Earth, with money there to take care of getting rich on his inventions. There was no reason to delay marriage. He wanted to get married. And through a deplorable oversight, there had been no method devised by which a legal marriage ceremony could be performed on Cetis Gamma Two.

  It was one of those accidental omissions which would presently be rectified. But the legal minds who’d set up the system for the planet had been thinking of money, not marriages. They hadn’t envisioned connubial bliss as a service the Company should provide. And Lon was raising cain. His barn was literally bursting with thanar leaves, and he was fill
ing up his attic, extra bedroom, living quarters and kitchen with more. He was rich. He wanted to get married. And it wasn’t possible.

  Lon was in a position to raise much more cain than ordinary. He’d made an amicable bargain with his fellow colonists. They brought truckloads of miscellaneous foliage to be put into his vegetation converter, and he converted it all into thanar leaves. The product was split two ways. Everybody was happy—except Carson—Because every colonist had already acquired enough thanar leaf to pay himself out of debt, and was working on extra capital.

  If this kept up, the galactic market would be broken.

  Carson had nightmares about that.

  * * * *

  So the sun went through convulsions in emptiness, and nobody on its second planet paid any attention at all. After about a week, it occasionally subsided. When that happened, the ionization of the planet’s upper atmosphere lessened, the radiation screen grew thinner, and a larger proportion of light reached the surface. When the sun flared higher, the shield automatically grew thicker. An astronomical phenomenon which should have destroyed all life on the inner planets came to be taken for granted.

  But events on the second planet were not without consequences elsewhere. The Board of Directors of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company simultaneously jittered and beamed with anticipation. If Lon could convert one form of vegetable product into another, then the Company’s monopoly of thanar would vanish as soon as he got loose with his device. On the other hand, if the Company could get that device for its very own.…

  Thanar had a practically unlimited market. Every year a new age group of the population needed a milligram a day to keep old age away. But besides that, there was Martian zuss fiber, which couldn’t be marketed because there wasn’t enough of it, but would easily fetch a thousand credits a kilo if Lon’s gadget could produce it from samples. There was that Arcturian sicces dust—the pollen of an inordinately rare plant on Arcturus Four—which could be sold at more than its weight in diamonds, for perfume. And—

  The directors of the Company shivered over what might happen; and gloated over what could. So they kept their fingers crossed while the space yacht of one of their number sped toward Cetis Gamma Two, manned by very trustworthy men who would carry out their instructions with care and vigor and no nonsense about it.

  Lon Simpson worked with his neighbors, converting all sorts of vegetable debris—the fact that some of it was scorched did not seem to matter—into thanar leaf which was sound legal tender on that particular planet. From time to time he went to Cetopolis. He talked sentimentally and yearningly to Cathy. And then he went to Carson’s office and raised the very devil because there was as yet no arrangement by which he and Cathy could enter into the state of holy matrimony.

  * * * *

  Rhadampsicus looked over his notes and was very well pleased. He explained to Nodalictha that from now on the return of Cetis Gamma to its normal condition would be a cut-and-dried affair. He would like to stay and watch it, but the important phenomena were all over now. He said solicitously that if she wanted to go on, completing their nuptial journey.… She might be anxious to see her family and friends.… She might be lonely.…

  Nodalictha smiled at him. The process would have been horrifying to a human who watched, but Rhadampsicus smiled back.

  “Lonely?” asked Nodalictha coyly. “With you, Rhadampsicus?”

  He impulsively twined his eye stalks about hers. A little later he was saying tenderly, “Then I’ll just finish my observations, darling, and we’ll go on—since you don’t mind waiting.”

  “I’d like to see my pets again,” said Nodalictha, nestling comfortably against him.

  Together, they scanned the second planet, but their thoughts could not penetrate its Rhinthak screen. They saw the space yacht flash up to it. Rhadampsicus inspected the minds of the bipeds inside it. Nodalictha, of course, modestly refrained from entering the minds of male creatures other than her husband.

  “Peculiar,” commented Rhadampsicus. “Very peculiar. If I were a sociologist, I might find it less baffling. But they must have a very queer sort of social system. They actually intend to harm your pets, Nodalictha, because the male now knows how to supply them all with food and energy! Isn’t that strange? I wish the Rhinthak screen did not block off scanning.… But it will fade, presently.”

  “You will keep the others from harming my pets,” said Nodalictha confidently. “Do you know, darling, I think I must be quite the luckiest person in the Galaxy, to be married to you.”

  * * * *

  The space yacht landed at the field outside Cetopolis. Inhabitants of the tiny town flocked to the field to see new faces. They were disappointed. One man came out and the airlock closed. No visitors.

  The skipper went into Carson’s office. He closed the door firmly behind him. He had very beady eyes and a very hard-boiled expression. He looked at Carson with open contempt, and Carson felt that it was because Carson did the Company’s dirty work with figures and due regard for law and order, instead of frankly and violently and without shilly-shallying.

  “This Lon Simpson’s got those gadgets, eh?” asked the skipper.

  “Why—yes,” said Carson unhappily. “He’s very popular at the moment. He made something on his barn roof that kept the sun from burning us all to death, you know—that still keeps us from burning to death, for that matter.”

  “So if we take it away or smash it,” observed the skipper, “we don’t have to worry about anybody saying nasty things about us afterward. Yeah?”

  Carson swallowed.

  “Everybody’d die if you smashed the gadget,” he admitted, “but all the thanar plants in existence would be burned up, too. There’d be no more thanar. The Company wouldn’t like that.”

  The skipper waved his hand. “How do I get this Simpson on my ship? Take a bunch of my men and go grab him?”

  “Wh-what are you going to do with him?”

  “Don’t you worry,” said the skipper comfortingly. “We know how to handle it. He knows how to make some things the bosses want to know how to make. Once I get him on the ship, he’ll tell. We got ways. Do I take some men and grab him, or will you get him on board peaceable?”

  “There—ah—” Carson licked his lips. “He wants to get married. There’s no provision in the legal code for it, as yet. It was overlooked. But I can tell him that as a ship captain, you—”

  The skipper nodded matter of factly.

  “Right. You get him and the girl on board. And I’ve got some orders for you. Gather up plenty of thanar seed. Get some starting trays with young plants in them. I’ll come back in a couple of days and take you and them on board. The stuff this guy has got is too good, understand?”

  “N-no. I’m afraid I don’t.”

  * * * *

  “I get this guy to tell us how to make his gadgets,” the skipper explained contemptuously. “We make sure he tells us right. To be extra sure, we leave the gadgets he’s got made and working back here, where he can’t get to ’em and spoil ’em. But when we know all he knows—and what he only guesses, too, and my tame scientists have made the same kinda gadgets, an’ they work—why, we come back and pick you up, and the thanar seed and the young growing plants. Then we get the gadgets this guy made here, and we head back for Earth.”

  “But if you take the gadget that keeps us all from being burned up—” Carson said agitatedly, “if you do, everybody here—”

  “Won’t that be too bad!” the skipper said ironically. “But you won’t be here. You’ll be on the yacht. Don’t worry. Now go fix it for the girl and him to walk into our parlor.”

  Carson’s hand shook as he reached for the beamphone. His voice was not quite normal as he explained to Cathy in the exchange that the skipper of the space yacht had the legal power to perform marriage ceremonies in space. And Carson, as a gesture of friendship to one of the m
ost prominent colonists, had asked if the captain would oblige Cathy and Lon. The captain had agreed. If they made haste, he would take them out in space and marry them.

  The skipper of the space yacht regarded him with undisguised scorn when he hung up the phone and mopped his face.

  “Pretty girl, eh?” he asked contemptuously, “and you didn’t have the nerve to grab her for yourself?” He did not wait for an answer. “I’ll look her over. You get your stuff ready for when I come back in a couple of days.”

  “But—when you release them,” Carson said shakily, “They’ll report—”

  The skipper looked at Carson without any expression at all. Then he went out.

  Carson felt sick. But he was a very loyal employee of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. From the windows of his air-conditioned office, he watched Lon Simpson greet Cathy on his arrival in Cetopolis. He saw Cathy put a sprig of chanel blossoms on the lapel of her very best suit, in lieu of a bridal bouquet. And he watched them go with shining faces toward the airport. He didn’t try to stop them.

  Later he heard the space yacht take off.

  * * * *

  Nodalictha prepared to share the thoughts and the happiness of the female biped whose emotions were familiar, since Nodalictha was so recently a bride herself. Rhadampsicus was making notes, but he gallantly ceased when Nodalictha called to him. They sat, then, before their crude but comfortable bower on the ninth planet, all set to share the quaint rejoicing of the creatures of which Nodalictha had grown fond.

  Nodalictha penetrated the thoughts of the female, in pleased anticipation. Rhadampsicus scanned the mind of the male, and his expression changed. He shifted his thought to another and another of the bipeds in the ship’s company. He spoke with some distaste.

  “The ones you consider your pets, Nodalictha, are amiable enough. But the others—” He frowned. “Really, darling, if you went into their minds, you’d be most displeased. They are quite repulsive. Let’s forget about them and start for home. If you really care for pets, we’ve much more suitable creatures there.”