“And yet your instruments showed they were there?” Ethel asked, surprised. “That was queer, wasn’t it?”
“The sun ruined my experiments,” the Amazon snapped. “The discharges of energy he keeps sending through space upset all the instruments. They were incapable of recording the presence of atomium, or anything else. All they did was record the sun’s disturbance ... so I had to fish by blind chance and got nothing. What is needed is something to cut out the sun’s interference, but if I do that I shall have to make my instruments insensitive, so...”
She sighed. “For the moment I’m beaten. My only hope is to go back into space and hunt for atomium on the off chance that I’ll find it. That may take years, and by then it will be too late. Once the sun has become a white dwarf nothing can restore him.”
“You mean,” Chris said, “that if you could find some atomium you could restore the sun?”
“I know I could. Mathematically, I know what atomium can do; my task would be to make the theory practical. Atomic discharge will continue in the sun until he finally collapses ... A vast boost in his internal energy, such as atomium could give, would start the atomic cycle going again and in building up new temperatures he could restore himself to his former level and the danger of collapse would disappear. It is all a matter of bringing him back to his critical temperature between 4.88 and 3.54.”
“But in the meantime,” Ethel said, “you think it best for everybody to go below?”
“Nothing else can be done,” the Amazon responded. “Go below by all means. I shall do likewise as the surface becomes unbearable. I only wish that Torrington were not the man behind the shelters.”
Ethel said: “He isn’t to be trusted. If only the law were not after you, Aunt Vi, you could examine the metal Torrington proposes to use and make sure it’s the right stuff. I can’t see him playing a straight game even if he does know it’s the end of the world.”
She glanced out of a window and saw that two large cars had just come up to the front door.
“Apparently the news of my return has reached the police,” she commented. “I have to go immediately. Carry out your plan, Chris, and go to Brazil. You’ll have a bit of comfort for a few months at least. I’ll join you there when I can.”
She opened the French windows and stepped outside, but her intention of a swift departure in her car was forestalled. Two armed policemen barred her path, their guns trained on her. She relaxed and shrugged as they came forward. True to her policy of never fighting when the odds were too heavily against her, she stood waiting.
“Evidently our chief of police remembers all avenues of escape,” she commented, then she pivoted round as an inspector and two sergeants came hurrying into view.
The inspector said: “Miss Brant — alias the Golden Amazon—you are under arrest. If you will come with us to headquarters the technical charges preferred against you will be stated. I have to warn you that—”
“You needn’t,” the Amazon interrupted. “I’ll come without giving you any trouble. In fact I’m rather anxious to verify my suspicion as to the person or persons behind this farce. For it is a farce, inspector, as perhaps you realize?” “My personal opinion has nothing to do with the case, Miss Brant. If you will come with us—?”
“Very well. What of my car?”
“One of my men will ride with you — and I would warn you against trying any tricks.”
The Amazon smiled. “That’s very thoughtful of you. Shall we be going?”
Chapter VII
The Amazon’s return and her trial before the Tribunal of Justice had the effect for the time being of taking people’s minds off the worry of the dying sun and shelter digging. Those who could possibly manage it attended the trial. The Wilson family was not represented. Following the Amazon’s suggestion, they had gone to Brazil, satisfied that the Amazon herself was the only one capable of extricating herself from her predicament.
Completely calm, the Amazon stood in the dock on the appointed morning. Well to the front of the courtroom were Brice Torrington, Morris Arnside and Ralph Swainson of the Atomic Power Corp. She smiled. Her three most deadly enemies, those who had striven to rid themselves of her scientific surveillance.
The public prosecutor recited the details of the accusation, to which the Amazon listened with an expression which suggested her mind was miles away. It was. Then she was forced to give her attention to the prosecutor as he stood before her.
“You are Violet Ray Brant, otherwise known as the Golden Amazon?”
“I am,” the girl agreed.
“Have you anything to say in regard to the charges levelled against you?”
“Yes — but I don’t expect you to believe me. You are all obviously determined to discredit me, no matter what I might say in my own defence. I knew what had happened to the sun long before the astronomers discovered it, and since that time I have been trying to find a remedy.”
“And have you?” the prosecutor asked, hope of salvation from the impending catastrophe making him forget his legal status for the moment.
“I have not — and if you condemn me I never shall. I’m looking for a metal at present theoretical, called atomium.” There was a pause. The Amazon’s statement had had just the effect she intended — and she pressed home the advantage.
“Gentlemen, you don’t just condemn me when you pass judgment; you condemn everybody on the Earth! You know me to be the greatest scientist alive today. I am not an egotist. I state a fact. I have it almost within my grasp to overcome the danger which threatens us — to even rekindle the dying sun, but to do it I must have freedom of action. If I am not given it you assign yourselves and the rest of humanity to the underworld forever!”
Brice Torrington jumped up. “Words, words, words,” he shouted, shaking an angry finger at the Amazon. “This woman has always been a smooth talker. She can get out of any tight corner by using subtlety.”
The prosecutor cleared his throat. “Miss Brant, what proof have we that you have been searching for this — er — atomium?”
“None, since it only exists in theory; but you have got proof that I don’t intend to run away. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come back to Earth.”
“I suggest you came back to Earth because you realized that in the existing confusion you might assume leadership,” the prosecutor snapped. “From that it would be a short step to ruling the world, as you have always wanted.”
The Amazon sighed. “Have it as you will. I said you would all disbelieve me because that is your avowed intention ... I would mention, though, that I am only in this court because it suits my purpose to be so. I could have escaped from the guards who arrested me; I could have broken the bars of my cell with my bare hands; I could even have hypnotized you, Mr. Prosecutor, into failing to build up a case against me.” Her strange eyes smouldered at him so that he felt obliged to look down at his notes to escape her gaze. “But I have used none of my powers because I want legal permission to carry on with my work and overcome this solar catastrophe. I can only get it by the court finding me innocent.”
“You knew all this would happen when you threw that Martian armada in the sun?” Torrington shouted.
“Not at the time. If you were in danger of being drawn into the sun, Mr. Torrington, you wouldn’t stop and weigh scientific possibilities. You would fight for survival, as I had to do.”
“Words,” the metals king breathed. “All words. This woman is a public menace.”
“The court will recess while the jury considers its verdict,” the judge announced, and the Amazon turned away with two wardresses at either side of her.
Twenty minutes later she was recalled to the dock. The judge glanced at her, then turned to the jury.
“Gentlemen of the jury, have you considered your verdict?”
“We have, sir.”
“And how do you find the prisoner? Guilty or not guilty?”
“Guilty — on all counts.” .
The Amazon’s ex
pression did not change. The judge turned to her again.
“Miss Brant, would it not have been better had you had a counsel for the defence instead of conducting your own?”
“No counsel could have put it better than I did.”
“Have you any further statement to make before judgment is passed upon you?”
“I have. You are all fools, throwing away your one chance of salvation because Brice Torrington orders it! Whatever you may decide to do to me, I shall come back and right this injustice in whatever way I see fit. And I shall remember you three—Torrington, Arnside and Swainson!”
“Normally,” the judge continued, “the penalty for your crimes, Miss Brant would be death in the lethal chamber, but, possessing as you do a supernatural constitution, it is doubtful if the gas would have effect. So I am prescribing another penalty, as I am empowered to do under law. It is banishment. You will be sent from Earth in a—”
“Coffin ship?” the Amazon interrupted. “I rather expected it. Torrington and his satellites would never rest while I remained on Earth, alive or dead. You will fire me out into space to that spot where great criminals have been sent — the dividing line between Earth and Moon. There, chained in my coffin ship, I will circle the Earth forever, the ship held by exactly balanced gravity of Earth and Moon gravity fields.”
“That,” the judge agreed, “is the punishment. And it will be carried out tonight at sunset.”
The Amazon said no more. She turned away with her jailers and disappeared from the dock.
That same evening, at what would normally have been sunset, the Amazon was marched from her cell in the midst of armed guards and out into the quadrangle of the great jail.
She submitted to being thrust inside the narrow, tubular rocket which would carry her into outer space. Once inside it a thin band of case-hardened steel mapped into place about her wrist, automatically locking itself. Another pinned her ankles close together, then two triple-linked chains were attached to wrist cuffs and snapped into their sockets.
The judge, a dim figure amidst the lights and whirling snow, uttered a few ceremonial words prescribed by law and then the airlock was locked on the outside. Then the Amazon set her teeth as with a sudden acceleration the rocket was fired. It tore through the tumult of the night — upward, onward, through atmosphere and troposphere, and onwards into the eternal silence of space. The glimmer of the sun shone drab gold through the two tiny portholes.
Its initial take-off speed somewhat lessened, there being just enough velocity to keep the rocket going against the pull of Earth’s gravity, the Amazon found the pressure more bearable. She began to breathe with greater freedom.
She looked through the nearest port. Earth was below, a giant half planet, one side cloaked in night; the other wan and white-patched where the deadly glaciers were advancing.
The sun, though plainly dying, was still alive enough to give light, dimly yellow though it was. Here, with no air intervening, the mighty chasms gouged in his once unbearably brilliant face were depressingly obvious.
Her survey completed the Amazon peered through the opposite porthole. The Moon was there, at the full, only faintly discernable because of the diminished light coming from the sun. When the hurtling coffin ship reached the balance line between Earth and Moon gravity-fields the rocket would cease its onward motion. Instead it would then follow an elliptical orbit, balanced exactly between the two fields so that it would forever circle the Earth as long as gravity remained.
For a while the Amazon relaxed, then she pulled on the chains holding her wrists to the metal walls of the rocket. No extra precautions had been taken. The coffin ship was of the conventional pattern used for criminals, but none of them had possessed the strength of the Golden Amazon.
By bringing her hands together the length of chain permitted her to cross her wrists, gripping the right chain with her left hand, and the left with the right. Then she began to pull, throwing every vestige of her power into the effort. At first she was unsuccessful, so she took a firmer grip, relaxed for several moments — then again threw her stupendous muscular strength into the struggle. Gradually the links began to bend. She twisted and turned them until they scorched her flesh, but each time they bent they became weaker until at last one of them snapped. With one hand free it only took the Amazon thirty seconds to finish the remaining links and her arms were free, the cuffs still clamped on her wrists with lengths of chain dangling from them.
The steel hoop about her waist was a tougher proposition. It refused to yield to direct treatment so she leaned her left arm over it, drawing her forearm beneath it and gripping the hoop half way down. By this method she could use her arm as a lever. She began forcing her arm backwards, her fingers gripped like pliers around the steel. It bent slightly but did not give way. Instead it tore loose from its locking clamp and waggled free.
The same treatment made short work of the ankle hoops and she rolled off the hard, narrow bed on to the floor where she lay thinking out what to do next; There was no opportunity to stand up. The rocket ship was only made to carry a recumbent passenger.
Without troubling to look, she knew that the rocket had no controls of any kind. It was mathematically timed to fall into the demarcation line and there stop, so to find a means of halting it and return to Earth was impossible. To be free of the chains and hoops was one thing, but to turn the freedom to account was another.
“When I reach the deadline,” she muttered, “I shall follow an elliptical orbit around the Earth. Yet one little push either way would send me crashing to either Earth or moon ...”
She thought back to a time when she had once turned a machine around in space by pushing it from the outside — but here there was no way out of the vessel, and if there had been, she had no space suit she could wear.
Meditation seemed to be the only answer. She gave herself up to it, turning over every detail of the situation in her mind as the rocket hurtled through emptiness. To every problem she believed there was a scientific answer — but the rocket reached the end of its journey without her finding one.
She only became aware of the change in motion by degrees. Wriggling to the porthole, she saw that the moon was to one side and the Earth to the other. The Earth did not appear to move, which satisfied her that she was travelling in a circle around it.
Chapter VIII
She flogged herself into thinking furiously, lying on the narrow bed to which she had formerly been secured. As she meditated she gazed out on the depthless mysteries of space — then after a while it occurred to her that an object she had at first taken to be a star was coming nearer. Out in the void distances were deceptive. A star light-centuries distant might look pretty much the same as a smaller mass only a few thousand miles away.
It began to dawn on her that the mass was in fact an irregular but enormous chunk of cosmic rock, its chipped facets catching the anaemic glimmering of the sun. She watched it, fascinated — then in growing alarm. There was no longer any doubt but what it was coming straight in her direction, perhaps drawn by the slight gravitational mass the space rocket possessed.
“Atomium,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “I could swear to it! Crystalline in formation, grey in colour. Normal space rock is black—”
She stopped, her mind reeling, before the contemplation of how much energy was in that enormous mass. From her own mathematical computations she knew that a square inch of the stuff was capable of destroying half a planet into vapour. Then this mass, if it really were atomium, could— The conviction of sudden and explosive death was upon her. She remained rigid, watching, her hands clamped on the porthole ledge. The cosmic mass seemed suddenly to leap forward. It blotted out all the stars. It was visible for a moment with its pitted surface and shining facets, like a blood-red ruby in the sinister crimson-yellow glow of the sun — then the travelling rocket received a blow which keeled it wildly through space, flinging the Amazon from the bed and upon her face on the floor. She had time to wonder t
hat the stuff had not blown her into eternity and the rocket as well, then she realized that the rocket ship was in the midst of a headlong fall.
Dizzy with the ghastly sensation of an endless drop, she got on to her knees, as high as she could, with her head touching the roof. Peering through the porthole, she saw that the mineral substance was gone. It had evidently struck the rocket ship a glancing blow, and careered off into space over the dividing line, destroying the hair-breadth balance, so that the vessel was now immovably chained to the Earth’s gravity field and hurtling downward toward the planet with ever-increasing speed.
The Amazon relaxed again on the floor, on her back — the only position she could take up to gain a certain amount of relief from the bottomless falling. Roughly she calculated how long a drop was ahead of her — but before it could be completed, the atmospheric friction would turn the rocket into a meteorite and she would be sealed inside a coffin of blazing molten metal.
Only one possibility could save her from this fate. The walls of the machine might be thick enough to resist the heat before it landed. And when it did land? The rocket would dive deep down into the earth, the shock of the impact bringing instant death to the occupant.
Whichever way, the Amazon viewed the problem she could foresee nothing but her own extinction. Not that she feared death. Her chief concern was that so much was left undone. Convinced as she was that she had happened upon atomium at the very moment when she could not use it, she wanted nothing more in life in order to make yet another effort to locate and harness the stuff.
“Or maybe it wasn’t atomium,” she whispered to herself. “It didn’t explode — so perhaps it was only rock after all.
Unless maybe atomium doesn’t explode by concussion.”
She gave up the effort of trying to solve the problem. The tremendous fall she was taking had made her sleepy. She could not tell whether hours or minutes had passed before she was suddenly jerked into alertness again by a rising scream from outside the machine.
Conquest of the Amazon Page 4
