The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Edmond Hamilton

  He did not relax his caution. A large mass of equipment went with him down the dark stairway, including the scanner. The valve closed automatically behind him and below in a small chamber he waited until pressure had build up and another door automatically opened. He found nothing more of menace except a system of alarm bells, which he put out of commission—not because there was anyone to hear them but because he knew there would be recorders and he wanted no signs, audible or visible, of his visit.

  The recorders themselves were relatively easy to detect. With an instrument brought for the purpose he blanked off their relay systems and went on across the great circular central chamber with the glassite dome through which the sunlight poured. He peered with a scientist’s fascinated wonder at the laboratory apparatus of various sorts in that and the smaller chambers which opened off it until he came to what of all things he was looking for—the heavy locked door of a vault, sunk deep in the lunar rock.

  Garrand worked for a long time over that door. The silence was beginning to get to him and the uneasy knowledge that he was where he had no right to be. He began to listen for the voices and the steps of those who might come in and find him.

  They were far away and Garrand knew that he was safe.

  But he was not a criminal by habit and now that the challenge to his skill was past he began to feel increasingly guilty and unclean. Personal belongings accused him, an open book, a pair of boots, beds and chests and clothing. If it had been merely a laboratory he would not have minded so much—but it was also a dwelling place and he felt like a common thief.

  That feeling was forgotten when he entered the vault. There were many things in that vast lunar cavern, but Garrand had no more than a passing glance for any of them except the massive file-racks where the recorded data which related to voyages were spooled and kept.

  Under the clear light that had come on of itself with the opening of the door Garrand searched the racks, puzzling out the intricate filing system. He had taken off his helmet. His hands shook visibly and his breathing was loud and irregular but these were only secondary manifestations.

  His mind, faced with a difficult problem to solve, slipped by long habit into calculating-machine efficiency and it was not long before he found what he wanted.

  He took the spool in his two hands, as tenderly as though it were made of the delicate stuff of dreams and apt to shatter at a breath. He carried it to the large table that stood by the racks and fed the end of the tape into a reader. His face had grown pale and quite rigid except that his mouth twitched a little at the corners. He set up his last piece of equipment beside the reader, a photosonic recorder used to make copies of a master spool, synchronized them and then closed the switches.

  The two spools unwound, one giving, the other receiving, and Garrand remained motionless over the viewer, seeing visions beyond price and listening to the voices that spoke of cosmic secrets. When the spool was finished it was a long time before he moved. His eyes were still busy with their visions and they were strangely dull and shining all at once, shining and far away.

  At last he shook himself and laughed, small gasping sound that might well have been a sob. He replaced the original in the rack and put the second spool into a special pouch on his belt. In the vault he left everything exactly as he had found it and when he came out again onto the Moon’s surface he reset the hidden trigger that guarded the outer door.

  As he had penetrated the defences on the plain, so he went back through them again, in a double agony lest now, when he had the thing he had taken such incredible chances for, he should blunder and be killed. The shadows of the crater edge were crawling toward him, sharp and black. The last premonitory clicking of the detector, the last fading of the warning pip from red to white and he was safe, running toward the ship into the knife-edged darkness of the shadow.

  Long before night came Garrand was gone, plunging across the narrow gulf to Earth. He did not know how to give vent to the wildness of his exultation, so he held it in but it burned in his face and eyes.

  “Tomorrow,” he said aloud to himself, over and over. “Tomorrow we’ll be on our way.” He laughed, addressing someone who was not present. “You said I couldn’t do it, Herrick. You said I couldn’t!”

  Behind him the darkening face of Ihe Moon looked after him.

  CHAPTER II

  Cosmic Secret

  Four came home to the Moon after many days. Four, of whom only one was an ordinary man.

  Curt Newton, the man—Otho, the android or artificial man who was human in everything but origin—Grag, the towering metal man or intelligent robot—and Simon Wright, he who had once been a man but whose brain only now lived on in a strange mechanical body.

  Their ship came down like a thunderbolt of metal from the sky. The camouflaged doors of an underground hangar opened silently to receive it and closed as silently.

  Into the great circular room beneath the observatory dome the four Futuremen came. Curt Newton paused by the wall to activate the recorder panel. It showed blank. It always showed blank.

  He sat down slowly, a tall man with red hair and a bronzed face that looked now very tired.

  “Do you think our work out there will stick, Simon?” he asked.

  He addressed the small square metal case hovering on motor-beams before him, its strange “face” of lens-eyes turned toward him. The serum-case, in which Simon Wright’s brain lived its life.

  “I am confident,” said Simon with his precise articulation of metallic artificial accents, “that there will be no more trouble between Uranus Mines and the natives.” Curt frowned and sighed. “I hope so. When will they learn how to deal with planetary primitives?”

  Grag spoke up loudly. He was standing, a seven-foot giant of metal, with his head turned and his photoelectric eyes staring intently across the big room.

  “Curt, someone’s been here,” his great voice boomed.

  “No. I checked the recorders,” Newton said without turning.

  “I don’t care,” Grag persisted. “That chair by the vault door has been moved. I was the last one out when we left and I remember exactly where it stood. It’s been moved a good three inches.”

  Otho burst into laughter. “Listen to Old Hawkeye. Three inches!” The android, so perfectly human in appearance that only something bright and strange lurking in his green eyes betrayed an inner difference, went on mockingly, “Are you sure it’s not two and a half inches?”

  Grag began to protest angrily in his foghorn voice. Curt swung around irritably to silence them. But Simon Wright said gravely, “Wait, Curtis. You know that the constitution of Grag’s metal brain makes his memory absolutely photographic. If he says the chair has been moved it has been moved.”

  “But the recorders?”

  “They could have been blanked, you know. It’s theoretically possible.”

  “Only theoretically—” Curt began and then he stopped and swore. “Blast you, Grag! Why did you have to raise a doubt in my mind? Now I’ll have to take down the recorders to check them and that’s the devil and all of a job.”

  Irritation riding him, he went out of the big room and came back with tools. He scowled at Grag. “You’d better be right!” Simon and Otho helped him in the delicate work of disassembling the recorders. They examined both the microfilm and the interior relay circuits bit by bit.

  Curt’s irritation left him suddenly. He looked sharply at the others. He had found it—the minute blurred line where the film had started to roll and been arrested. The relay circuits were a fraction of a decimal out of synchronization now.

  Otho whistled softly. “Blanked!” he said. “And so beautifully done—nothing fused or blown out, the derangement so small that you’d never notice it unless you were searching for it.”

  “So I was right?” Grag boomed triumphantly. “I knew I was right. When I see a thing that’s changed I—”

  “Shut up,” Curt Newton told him. He looked, puzzled, at Simon. “No criminal did this
—no ordinary criminal. The job of blanking these relays required tremendous scientific ability.”

  Simon brooded, hovering. “That’s obvious. Only an expert in sub-electronics would be capable. But that seems incongruous. Why would a top scientist come prowling in here like a common thief?”

  Curt turned. “Grag, will you see if anything else has been moved or taken?” The metal giant started stalking through the rooms. Curt remained silent and thoughtful, the frown on his tanned face deepening.

  Grag came back. “No. Nothing else has been tampered with.”

  “Yet it was,” Curt said slowly. He looked again at Simon. “I’ve been thinking. An expert in sub-electronics… Do you remember the nuclear physics man down at New York Tech whom we met at Government Center a few months ago?”

  “Garris? Garrand—some name like that? I remember. A nice little man.”

  “Yes, I thought so too—very eager about his work. But I remember now he asked me a question—”

  Curt broke off suddenly. He went rapidly across the big room, unlocked the vault door and inside the silent lunar cavern he went straight to the files.

  Simon had followed him. And when Simon saw the spool that Curt drew from the file his lens-eyes turned to Curt’s face with a startled swiftness.

  “Curtis, no! You don’t think—”

  “It was what he asked me about,” Curt said. “The Birthplace.”

  The word went echoing solemnly back and forth around the cold rock walls. And Curt stared at Simon, not really seeing him, seeing uncanny awesome things that lived in memory, and a strange look came into his face—a strange look indeed for the man Curt Newton. A look of fear.

  Simon said, “How could he know of the Birthplace?”

  That word had never been spoken to anyone. They hardly spoke it even among themselves. Such a secret was not for the knowledge nor the use of men and they had guarded it more carefully than the sum total of all other knowledge they possessed. Now the very sound of that name brought Grag and Otho to the door and wrought a sudden tension that filled the cavern with a waiting stillness.

  Curt said heavily, “He connected the theoretical possibility with the work we did on Mercury. He’s a brilliant man, Simon—too brilliant.”

  “Perhaps,” said Grag, “he only looked for the secret and couldn’t find it. After all, our filing system…”

  Curt shook his head. “If he could get in here he could find what he wanted.” He examined the spool. “He could make a copy of this and there would be no way of telling that it had been done.”

  He stood motionless for a moment longer and no one spoke. Otho studied his face and shot one quick bright glance at Simon. Simon moved uneasily on his gliding force-beams.

  Curt replaced the spool and turned. “We’ve got to find out about this man. We’ll go to New York, at once.”

  Very soon thereafter the Comet rose from the dark gap of the hangar-mouth and shot away toward the great green globe of Earth.

  Not much later, at headquarters of the Planet Police in New York, old marshal Ezra Gurney stared at Curt Newton in blank amazement.

  “Garrand?” he said. “But he’s a reputable man, a scientist!”

  “Nevertheless,” said Curt grimly, “I want all the information you can get and fast.”

  Simon spoke. “This is urgent, Ezra. We cannot afford delay.”

  The grizzled old spaceman glanced from one to the other, and then to Otho. “Something really bad, eh? All right, I’ll do what I can.”

  He went out of the office. Otho leaned against the wall and remained motionless, watching Curt. Simon hovered near the desk. Neither one of them was afflicted with nerves. Curt moved restlessly about, brooding, his hands touching things and putting them down again in wire-taut gestures. The intricate multichron on the wall whirred softly and the minutes slid away, on Earth, on Mars, on the far-flung worlds of the System. No one spoke and Ezra did not come back.

  Simon said at last, “It would take time, even for Ezra.”

  “Time!” said Curt. “If Garrand has the secret we have no time.”

  He paced the small neat room, a man oppressed with heavy thoughts. The sound of the door opening brought him whirling around to face Ezra almost as though he were facing his executioner.

  “Well?”

  “Garrand took off from Earth on the twenty-first,” said Ezra. “He flew a ship of his own, apparently an experimental model on which he has been working for some time in company with a man named Herrick, who is also listed as chief pilot. Destination, none. Purpose, cosmic ray research beyond the System. Because of Garrand’s reputation and standing there was no difficulty about the clearance. That was all I could get.”

  “That’s enough,” said Curt. “More than enough.” His face was bleak and the color had gone out of it under the tan. He looked very tired and in a way so strange that Ezra came up to him and demanded, “What is it, Curt? What did Garrand take from the laboratory?”

  Curt answered, “He took the secret of the Birthplace of Matter.”

  Ezra stared, uncomprehending. “Is that a secret you can tell me?”

  Curt said hopelessly, “I can tell you now. For it’s known now to Garrand and this other man.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Ezra, it is the secret of creation.”

  There was a long silence. It was obvious from Gurney’s face that the term was too large for him to understand. Yet Curt Newton did not continue as yet. He looked beyond them and his face was drawn and haggard.

  “We’ll have to go back there,” he said, his voice low. “We’ll have to. And I hoped never to go back.”

  Simon’s expressionless eyes were fixed on him. Otho said loudly, “What’s there to be afraid of? We ran the whirls before. And as for Garrand and the other one—”

  “I am not afraid of them,” Curt Newton said.

  “I know,” said Simon. “I was the only one who was with you in the shrine of the Watchers there. I know what you are afraid of—yourself.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Ezra said. “The secret of creation? Creation of what?”

  “Of the universe, Ezra. Of all the matter in the universe.”

  A strange wonder came on Gurney’s timeworn face. He said nothing. He waited.

  “You remember,” Curt told him, “when we came back from our first deep-space voyage? You remember that right after that we designed the electron-assembly plants that they’ve used ever since to replenish Mercury’s thinning atmosphere? Where do you think we got the knowledge to do that, to juggle electrons into desired types of matter on a big scale?”

  Gurney’s voice was a whisper now. “You got that knowledge out in deep space?”

  “In deep, deep space, Ezra. Near the center of our galaxy, amid the thick star-clusters and nebulae beyond Sagittarius. There lies the beating heart of our universe.”

  He made a gesture. “Back in the Twentieth Century the scientist Millikan first guessed the truth. The matter of the universe constantly melts away into radiation. Millikan believed that somewhere in the universe was a place where radiation was somehow built back into matter and that the so-called cosmic rays were the ‘birth-cry’ of the newborn matter. The fount of our material universe, the birthplace of material creation.”

  Awe was in Ezra’s faded old eyes. “And you found that? And never told—never let anyone guess—”

  “Garrand guessed,” Curt said bitterly. “He connected our work at Mercury with our mysterious voyage. He tried to learn what I knew and when I would tell him nothing he came to the Moon and risked death to steal our records. And now he’s gone to find it for himself.”

  Simon Wright said somberly, “He will only reap disaster if he tries to take it. I saw what almost happened there to you, Curtis.”

  “It’s my fault,” Curt said harshly. “We should have left no record. But I could not quite destroy it.” He paused, then went on rapidly. “We’ve got to overtake him. What the other man, Herrick, may have
in mind we can’t tell. But Garrand is a fanatical researcher, who will tamper with the instruments of the Watchers as I did. He won’t stop where I stopped!”

  Ezra jumped to his feet. “I can have cruisers after him in an hour.”

  “They couldn’t catch him now, Ezra. The Comet might. We’ll have to make certain preparations and they’ll take time. But even so we may catch him.”

  He turned, moving swiftly toward the door as though physical action were a relief from overpowering tension. Ezra stopped him. “Curt, wit! Let me go with you. I should, you know, if it’s a case of catching a lawbreaker.”

  Newton looked at him. “No, Ezra. You’re only trapped by the lure of this thing as I was. As I was… No.”

  Simon’s metallic voice intervened. “Let him go with us, Curtis. I think we might need him—that you might need him.”

  A look passed between them. Then, silently, Curt nodded.

  Back to the Moon, with five instead of four, went the Comet on wings of flame. In the hours that followed, the closed hangar-doors in silent Tycho gave no hint of the desperate rushed activity beneath.

  But less than twenty-four hours after its return from Uranus the ship left the Moon a second time. It went out through the planetary orbits like a flying prisoner breaking out through bars, poised for a moment beyond Pluto to shift into a new kind of motion, then was gone into the outer darkness.

  CHAPTER III

  The Birthplace

  The Comet was a fleck, a mote, a tiny gleam of man-made light falling into infinity. Behind it, lost somewhere along the farthest shores of a lightless sea, lay Earth and Sol and the outposts of familiar stars. Ahead was the great wilderness of Sagittarius, the teeming star-jungle that to the eye seemed crowded thick with burning Suns and nebulae.

  The five within the ship where silent. Four were busy with the memories they had of the time they had come this way before, with the knowledge of what was still to be encountered. One, Ezra Gurney, could find no words to speak. He was a veteran spaceman. He had been a veteran when Curt Newton was born. He knew the Solar System from Pluto to Mercury and back again and he knew how the naked undimmed stars could shine.