The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  To publish his results now would not be challenging the scientific hierarchy but simply offering one more piece of data fitting in with and completing a structure already established. Kitty now was certain to release him from his promise if he explained.If he explained, he would tell her that she had only a little more than three weeks to live. To publish his results would be to tell the people of the world that inevitably, helplessly, they were doomed to die before another month had passed.

  “Perhaps I am wrong,” Johnny Rober wrote, “but I see no point in pronouncing this sentence of death to all my kind. If there was any possibility of avoiding it — and there is none — I shall keep silent.”

  One would expect that, in the days that followed, the burden of his dreadful secret would have brought him near to madness. Nothing could be further from the event. He’d never lectured as brilliantly, never had been as penetrating as in that time. The youngsters in his courses came from his room walking on clouds, their laces aglow as though they’d been listening to great music.

  During his afternoons and evenings with Kitty — he spent all possible free time with her — he’d never been as exuberant, as gay or as tender. He made her very happy. So happy that she paid no attention to the newspaper items, small at first and on the back pages then lengthening, working their way toward the front, that told of a strange new malady decimating the Scandinavian Peninsula, the northern reaches of Russia and Siberia, and Alaska.

  But there are more ways than one to skin a cat. A physicist in the University of Moscow got the notion of determining by photochemical means the direction from which the gamma rays were arriving in our stratosphere. His results were so significant that he requested colleagues in Oslo University, Edinburgh, McGill, to check them. Somewhere, someone talked out of turn.

  A reporter for one of the world-wide news services started digging. Some scientists are anxious for the limelight, others more circumspect are naive. And so Johnny Rober, calling for Kitty early the morning of the Sunday two weeks after that on which this narrative began, found her dressed for their all-day picnic but staring white-faced at the front page of the newspapers she’d just picked up from her porch.

  In huge black type, a headline screamed across it:

  SCIENTISTS FIND DEATH RAY SOURCE IN SKY

  Invisible Comet Nearing Earth

  Predict All Life Extinct in Two Weeks

  “No-o-o,” she moaned. “It’s a hoax, Johnny. It’s cruel!” She checked herself. “Johnny! Your meteor. The one your radar found. This is it.”

  He nodded mutely. The bubble-shell of protection he’d blown around her was pricked. What was there for him to say?

  “It’s my fault.” Kitty’s pupils were great black pits within which horror crawled. “If I’d let you talk, something could have been done to stop this.”

  “No, darling,” Johnny said gently. “Nothing could have been done to stop it. Nothing at all.”

  The paper dropped from her hand.

  “Two weeks,” she whispered. And suddenly she was smiling. “Let’s get married, Johnny. Right away.”

  “It’s Sunday, dear. We can’t get a license until tomorrow morning. We’ll have to wait.”

  “Must we?” Twenty-four hours out of a lifetime which has only two weeks to run is a terribly long time. “Must we wait, Johnny?”

  “Yes.” Had he been able to look twenty- four hours into the future, would he have replied so? “Yes, my very dear, we must wait.”

  In a thousand languages and dialects that same terrible announcement blackened newspaper fronts all across the world. In as many tongues it filled the broadcast channels. By mid-morning — four p.m. in London, two o’clock Monday morning in Melbourne — it had been carried by word of mouth to the headwaters of the Amazon, by booming drums to the remotest jungles of Africa. The furred nomads of the Arctic wastes had heard it and the Touregs of the Sahara knew now how low had run the sands in the hour-glass of human life.

  At eleven, denials of the “rumor” met with disbelief everywhere. At noon there were “explanations” that did not explain. At four in the afternoon scientists whose names were household words were admitting the “basic facts” but were assuring that “there is no cause for alarm. We have already devised methods by which the threatened disaster will be averted. Further announcements will be made as soon as our plans have crystallized.” And on a hill near Los Angeles a bearded man in a white robe preached the Day of Judgment while his fifty thousand dupes roared welcome to the Messiah.

  In a Paris garret, Aristide Jouin worked furiously to complete his masterpiece of painting. In a hut high on a Bavarian Alp, Martin Bohrs — only intimate of Hitler to escape capture — cut his own throat. Big Ben tolled over BBC’s microphones and then the Prime Minister was speaking:

  “We shall weather this trial as we have weathered all others. Even though the heavens themselves fall, there will always be an England.”

  The President of the United States issued an order that the Stock Exchange remain closed Monday. Advices had reached him that a tidal wave of short-selling was in prospect.

  At one a.m. Johnny Rober was in his room, listening with half an ear to the radio while he packed his few belongings.

  “We take you now to Verndon, Vermont,” he heard, “for an interview with Professor Giles Foster, Director of the Cunningham Institute for Physical Research.”

  “So Giles Foster is shooting off his mouth too,” Johnny muttered. “I thought more of him than that.”

  He went to the bathroom to collect his shaving kit. On his way back he wondered if there would be plenty of hot water in Kitty’s house. When he opened the door, Foster’s somewhat unctuous voice greeted him. “The only way to confirm or disprove all this wild speculation is to make our observations out in space, beyond the interference of terrestrial conditions.”

  “In a space ship, professor?” the interviewer asked. “Even if that were feasible, could one be built in time?”

  “The Institute has very nearly completed one. Oh, not a space-ship that could transport passengers but an instrument-carrying rocket we’re sure can attain the acceleration of seven miles a second per second that will free it from Earth’s gravitational attraction.”

  The radio station interviewer still seemed doubtful about several points.

  “Will not atmospheric friction at that speed burn up your rocket before it gets out of the atmosphere?”

  “No. We’ve solved that problem.” Johnny was motionless in the center of the room, the shaving kit still clutched in his hand. “We’ve synthesized a new substance. Refractite, which can withstand higher temperatures than any natural material known and is so non-conductive of heat that the delicate instruments within the rocket will not be affected. Incidentally, Refractite presented us with an unexpected problem to solve when it proved to be well-nigh impervious to radio-active emanations, including the gamma rays.”

  “What’s that?” the network man barked. “Impervious to — Good heavens! Don’t you realize what you’ve got? It’s the stuff that will save the race. This is terrific!”

  And then the savant’s imperturbable voice chilled the blaze of excitement that had caused the radio man to forget his impersonal role.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve misled you. Only enough of the substance exists to construct this one rocket. It would take six months to turn out any more, a year to put it into mass production.”

  “But — ”

  “Please permit me to continue.” Foster might be chiding a too-voluble student. “I was trying to say that because this unexpected property of Refractite would have shuttered the gamma rays from the instrument designed to record them, we were compelled to devise a detachable false nose of the synthetic to house the recorder in a separate compartment, and a means for discarding this shell when the rocket has passed out of the atmosphere. I mention this merely as a single example of the difficulties with which we have had to contend.”

  The interview continued. It had ori
ginally been planned to steer the rocket by remote radio control but, Foster explained, the necessary apparatus could not be completed in time for the launching, which would be at dawn on Tuesday. The instruments composing its cargo would send their data back to Earth by means of automatic microwave transmitters similar to those used by meteorologists in their sounding balloons but the rocket itself would be lost. Yes, in response to a question, yes it was quite large. It had to be to carry the fuel that was required in addition to all the apparatus. The compartment containing the apparatus would comfortably accommodate a man if it were not otherwise filled.

  “Thank you, professor,” the broadcaster ended the talk. “Ladies and gentlemen. You have been listening to an interview with Professor Giles Foster of the Cunningham Institute for Physical Research. I return you now to New York, where Ben Grauer is waiting to tell you more of what is going on in the metropolis.

  The radio rasped and then another voice was speaking. A mob looted Broadway’s liquor stores and Times Square was a scene of Saturnalia. Two blocks away, on Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the St. Nicholas Collegiate Church were packed to the doors with praying multitudes, as was Temple Emanu-El farther north. Marty Tanville, much-married heir to an unearned fortune, had appeared at the Children’s Society Shelter with a truckload of toys and another of candy and ice cream, and had given these things away.

  It is doubtful that Johnny Rober heard any of this, or the later reports, of the howling horde of Untouchables that hunted high-caste Brahmins through the twisted alleys of Calcutta, of the twenty virgins sacrificed in the depths of Yucatan to the Feathered Serpent, god of the ancient Mayans.

  At seven Monday morning Kitty looked up the street to see if Johnny was yet in sight. There was no sign of him, but on the porch lay a paper-wrapped package and atop it a letter addressed to her in his handwriting. She tore open the envelope, unfolded the sheet of paper it contained. She read:

  Dearest —

  My keeping silent about what the radar told me did make a difference. It cost two weeks of valuable time. I’m going to try and make that up.

  The package contains my notebook. Keep it for me, unopened, until noon on Tuesday. After that, take it to Gardey.

  If my idea doesn’t work out, we’ll be together again very soon. If it does, always remember that I loved you more deeply than language can tell. Goodbye, darling.

  Johnny Rober appeared in Washington later that morning. Here a certain Army General consented to talk to him privately because he recalled Johnny as one of the more brilliant of the young scientists who’d worked under him on the development of the atomic bomb. About noon, Johnny and the General left Bolling Field in the General’s personal plane, for some destination unknown. One of the men assisting at the takeoff overheard the officer’s comment.

  “I’ll be court-martialed for this but I certainly can take that if you can take what you’re facing,” the General said.

  With this, John Rober vanishes from the face of the Earth.

  It is comprehensible that the General, a layman who had supervised the working of a scientific miracle and was now the custodian of its secrets, should have been carried away by the starkly simple daring of Johnny’s plan. Giles Foster’s part in it is still obscure. Was he also in on the thing, or was he merely too much the unworldly pundit to realize that after his broadcast he should have placed guards about the rocket? Probably the latter. From all reports he was thunderstruck when, some two hours after its dispatch, all the instruments that were to have formed its cargo were found hidden in a nearby thicket.

  By that time the rocket was some sixty- seven thousand miles out in space and within it, in the compartment he’d emptied of its instruments, was Johnny Rober. In his notebook he had written as follows:

  There is only one way to be certain that it arrives at the right point at the right time. I shall have to guide it there. Since it was originally designed to be steered by remote control, there must be some means of maneuvering it. I shall take along food concentrates, water, and three or four oxygen flasks such as bombers carried for emergencies during the war. These should keep me alive and conscious long enough to do what I plan. The only question is whether, after the flight through the stratosphere, there will be sufficient fuel left for what navigation will be required.

  It did not enter in his calculations, you see, whether consciousness or fuel would last long enough to bring him back to Earth.

  I must be certain to locate and disconnect the automatic control designed to cast off the false nose Foster mentioned. This is the most fortunate part of the whole affair. Had it not been for this feature of the rocket’s construction, I should have had no way to unloose the atomic bomb.

  There was the crux of his plan. He would carry an atomic bomb out across space to the death-bearing meteor. When the bomb exploded, its tremendous blast of energy would dissipate or at least divert the whirlpool of gases that by now was a scant four and a half million miles from its grim rendezvous with the Earth.

  It would be nearer before Johnny could intercept it.

  “As nearly as I can calculate, I’ll know the answer some time Saturday afternoon,” he wrote in the diary.

  On Saturday Johnny knew he would lock himself into the rocket Tuesday, before dawn. He would have nearly five days to go. Five days not only of darkness and discomfort but of such loneliness as no man yet has been called on to contemplate. Even a prisoner in solitary confinement knows that somewhere near him are other human beings. Even a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in mid-Pacific knows that somewhere on the same sea are ships and, within the ships, men. During those five days Johnny Rober would be keenly aware that second by second, minute by minute, eight miles every second, four hundred and eighty every minute, he was leaving behind him forever the world of his own kind.

  Monday morning Johnny wrote a last poignant line in his notebook.

  “Today was to have been my wedding day.”

  “A hero is speeding to blast the meteor menace from the sky,” was the announcement that went out on the radio at eleven minutes after noon on Tuesday — six p.m. in London, 4 a.m. Wednesday in Melbourne. Good news, it is said, does not spread as swiftly as bad, but in this case the old saying proved to be wrong. As quickly as the shadow of an eclipse passes from the globe, so quickly did the terror pass. Before the result could possibly have been known, desperate hope became reality in the minds of man.

  * * * *

  Five days went by.

  At three-fifty-seven p.m. watchers in Midwest University’s Observatory saw a new star flash out in the daylight sky, bright even against the brightness of the sun. The nova faded at once but the location plotted for it corresponded precisely to the point in space which Johnny Rober’s figures predicted would be occupied by the gaseous meteor at that instant in time. By four-thirty reports already were coming in to the Director of the Electronics Laboratory that the gamma ray concentration in Earth’s atmosphere was dwindling.

  * * * *

  When I took the first of these reports to Kitty, she smiled for the first time in six days, a wan and heartrending smile.

  “Aren’t you proud of Johnny?” I asked her, offering such clumsy consolation as a father might give. “Aren’t you proud to have known and been loved by him?”

  “To be loved by him,” she flared back at me with a bit of her old fiery spirit. “He’s alive, Gardey. He’s alive and he’ll come back to us. You know what he wrote.”

  She referred to the letter he’d written to me and enclosed with his notebook. After some personal remarks which I hardly deserve, there was this:

  After I’ve loosed the bomb, I shall try to reverse the rocket. I doubt whether I shall have enough fuel left to do more than cancel its outward momentum but if I can do that Earth’s gravity should bring me back in free fall. After that — well, the surface of the globe is three parts water to one part land.

  I’m sure that among Foster’s radio set-ups there will be one that can b
e fixed to emit a continuous signal. If there is, and if — if all the thousand “ifs” sum up to my getting back to Earth alive, I shall try to get it going. Be listening.

  “Yes,” I answered my black-eyed daughter. “I haven’t forgotten what he wrote. The Navy Department has arranged to have all the oceans patrolled either by our planes or those of all the other grateful nations. All we can do now is wait.”

  That is what we are doing now. Waiting. I’ve written this narrative while I waited and I hope I have succeeded in writing it as objectively as I set out to do. It is six days and five hours now since that nova flared out and faded. I’ve given up hope. Kitty has not. I’ve just received the following telegram from the General who thought court-martial after a lifetime of honored service a small risk against what Johnny faced:

  PROFESSOR CHARLES DARWIN GARDLANE, MID-WEST UNIVERSITY.

  SEARCH PLANE OVER PACIFIC HAS HEARD WEAK VHF RADIO SIGNAL STOP CAN BE ONLY ROBER STOP INSIST ON INVITATION TO WEDDING.

  NO ESCAPE FROM DESTINY

  CHAPTER I.

  New Projector

  The room was like a tomb. There were only the gray walls, the gray floor and ceiling.

  There was only the rasp of my irate breathing as I stood with my back against the locked door, waiting for something unguessable to happen.

  The melodramatic mystery with which Malvin Parker surrounds his demonstration of each new invention has irritated me ever since the fall midnight in 1952. This was when he locked the door of the cubbyhole we shared at Tech U., produced what seemed to be an ordinary dinner plate somewhat dirtier than the hundreds we washed every day in the Commons’ steamy kitchen and with no other tool but his fingernails, stripped a thin film from it to display it clean and sparkling as if it had just come from the tubs.

  That was the first piece ever made of the laminated tableware that has emancipated the world’s housewives from the postprandial sink. On that plate, and a hundred-odd other products of Parker’s fecund brain, were founded the vast Loring Enterprises and my own not inconsiderable fortune. The best piece of business I’ve ever done was to sign him up, that very night, to the contract by which I engaged to support him and his dependents for life in exchange for a blanket assignment of all his past and future patents.