Fletcher Pratt

by Alien Planet

  Ashembe occupied himself with minor adjustments and construction work inside the space ship; preparations for the long jump from Mercury to wherever we were going. Motors had to be furbished up and examined for flaws; the heating arrangements for the interior of the car he went over with extreme care and in much detail, and during the last two or three days he spent every waking moment over the burned out photoelectric cell. The repair was not an entire success; the potassium of the cell had undergone a certain amount of chemical decomposition, he informed me, and he lacked both the space and the laboratory facilities to recover the pure metal from the salts that had been formed.

  It was the eighteenth of January, then, when we donned our atotta suits and again made the trip to the outside. The first thing I noticed was that two of the windmills had ceased to revolve and that others were going very slowly. Ashembe's gesture was one of pure delight when he saw this, and he hurried to replace the cylinders under these windmills with others. They were filled, it appeared. The loaded cylinders were taken to the outer compartment of the car, and released into the vacant space at the bow that had held our helium fuel.

  Two of the bow compartments were still filled with the gas that had borne us from the Earth, and of all the sights I saw on that singular planet I think that of the emerging helium was the most curious. In the shadow of the outer compartment it fell out, a thick, visible steam that curled along the floor, gradually rising about us to the opening above our heads. As it reached the dazzling rays of the Mercurian sun, it suddenly danced with rainbow radiance and as though blown by a strong wind (though there was no stir on that airless and lifeless planet) trailed off and away to the distant mountains.

  Another month elapsed before we had gathered enough of the precious pleci to fill all the compartments at the peak of our space ship. The time was spent in eating, sleeping, studying in the interior of the car. It was no use going out on exploring expeditions. The heat and cold of the unchanging Mercurian landscape were so severe that they bit through even an atotta suit after a small period of exposure, and the long cracks across the plateau on which we had landed made any journey of exploration doubly dangerous.

  I may say here for the benefit of those few who will be interested, that the material of Mercury is an igneous rock of extremely ancient character. At the surface on the side where we landed (near the north pole of the planet and on the light side close to the edge of the dark) the impact of solar heat and the small particles of material which have been driven out from the sun by radiation pressure in the course of ages had exercised a certain erosional effect on the solid rock of the surface. A close examination of it showed it filled with minute pits and bubbles and at times, stepping on an apparently solid piece of stone, one would sink ankle deep in the crumbling material. To complete the picture, a thick coating of dust lay over everything, dust a foot or two deep. Mercury, from my one view of it, is certainly not a place I would care to visit again—a shell of a world, wrecked and rotten, spoiled in the making. A melancholy place....

  VIII

  AT THIS point in Schierstedt's manuscript, several sheets apparently are missing, so that we skip abruptly from the opening sentence, "We left Mercury late in February of my year 1 ..." to the middle of a statement by Ashembe, "... and we are now in the region of your planet Jupiter." He continues, "I calculate that when we arrive just beyond the radius of your planet Uranus, we will be far enough from your sun's gravitational attraction to make the turn toward Murashema and put on the full power of the motors. That will be in about two hundred seventy or more of your days—about nine of your months."

  From internal evidence, as the reader will see at the close of the manuscript, Schierstedt's story was concluded in considerable haste; but this alone does not seem to account for such lacunae as this one. I can only conjecture that the missing pages contained Ashembe's explanation to Schierstedt of the exact location of Murashema, and that it was decided not to allow this information to reach Earth. However, this is only conjecture on my part.

  Appalling prospect—nine months of travel through the void toward nothing at all, merely to reach a point where we could turn around and begin our real journey. I murmured something inarticulate.

  "Far from some difficult as it appears," said Ashembe, guessing at my thought. "After we once turn around toward Murashema, speed will rapidly become high. Perceive by what I have told you. When we turn on full power of motors, this is sufficient to represent an acceleration of 200 kilometers per second. In twenty-five minutes, we will arrive at the speed of light. In seven hours from that time, we will arrive at sixteen times the speed of light. That is the highest speed we dare to obtain even in empty space as gravitational attraction of unexpected dark bodies might draw us from the course without opportunity for rectification, and at speed beyond this, rectification would become impossible.

  "If we maintained the above speed, would reach Murashema in one year eight months of your time. It will take slightly longer, as when we arrive at such speed we will very soon be necessary to produce slow negative acceleration to arrive within the gravitational field of Murashema at proper speed for navigating interplanetary space."

  He looked at me and perceived that further explanations were needed.

  "When we turn toward Murashema," he continued, "we must point the Shoraru directly at the same sun. You perceive? Our planet being dark and therefore not visible, all we can do at this extreme distance is to point at the sun. Very good, then. If we approach the sun of Murashema at extreme speed of sixteen times speed of light, what then? Add this to gravitational attraction, and we would charge right into the sun with crash. Therefore we must slow down soon after we reach the peak of speed, allowing us to make the proper turn in direction when we reach the Murashema system. Now do you perceive?"

  It was all very complicated. I never did have a good head for mathematics and the abstract (and abstruse) sciences that are based upon it. If he could only explain the whole business simply to me, I thought. One thing did stick in my gullet, however, and that was the statement that it would take another nine months or so to reach the limits of the solar system and two years beyond that to reach Murashema. Three years in that miserable little world of a Shoraru with nothing to do! Good Lord what a prospect! *

  * To persons of a scientific turn of mind, it will always be a matter of regret that Schierstedt was so much concerned with his precious mental reaction and so little concerned with the mathematical and physical details of the trip. If he had only been a scientist!

  His whole explanation of the trip flies in the face of modem scientific theory. According to Einstein (and so far, we have no physicist who has plumbed such matters more deeply) it would be quite impossible for the car to attain a speed sixteen times the speed of light. The speed of light is of the order of 186,000 miles per second; and nothing, on the Einstein theory, can 'exceed this speed. It is a more or less arbitrary limit to cosmical velocities.

  But it is only fair to say that Murasheman physical science appears to be beyond ours. Einstein's predictions, marvelously as they have been borne out so far, are theoretical only; no man from this Earth has succeeded in navigating space and applying to them the empirical test. And even on Einstein's own theory a body in free space would maintain a uniform velocity through inertia. If Schierstedt is right in setting down the influence of acceleration, and if the acceleration could be applied in the manner described (according to Earthly science it could not) it is quite possible that the result might be as Schierstedt has stated. In this case, the extreme speeds mentioned by him are perfectly explicable.

  At all events, the whole matter is one worthy the attention of physical scientists, and is recommended to their attention.

  In the days and months that followed, however, I discovered unplumbed possibilities of occupation within myself. Without any natural capacity for mathematics, I studied the subject as a matter of necessity and to keep from going mad. To my surprise, I found I was making considera
ble progress. Long before we reached Murashema I was able to make independent checks on some of Ashembe's calculations, much to the delight of my companion.

  During those early days of our progress through the solar system, Ashembe initiated me more and more deeply into the mysteries of the three dimensional chess he had shown me back at Joyous Gard....*

  * There follows a lengthy description of the game (which Schierstedt had already described before) and some notes on how to play it, with samples of illustrative games. As these are of no possible interest, I have taken the liberty of omitting them in this published version of the manuscript.

  After the early stages, in which Ashembe was kept constantly warning me against this or that indiscretion, I began to hold my own to a certain extent, even in winning an occasional victory. But these, I regret to say, were usually in cases where my defense proved unexpectedly stubborn, and Ashembe, losing interest, would deliberately make injudicious moves to get the thing over with.

  Ashembe, of course, had the tensal helmet. Occasionally he would have me read to him from some of the mathematical books, but more often he would put on the helmet, touch some of the keys, and drop off to sleep. He informed me that in addition to being an educational device, it was a radio receiving set of a power higher than anything we had on Earth, and by manipulating it properly, he was able to tune in on broadcasts from Murashema, although he could not transmit messages. The transmission apparatus was one of the things he had intended to build back at Joyous Gard, but he had been deprived of any such possibility by the sudden raid of the police.

  My own distrust of the apparatus probably kept me from much knowledge that would have been useful on our journey and afterward. But to bolster that distrust, I had Ashembe's hesitancy to let me use the instrument. "I am not certain of your mental quality," he told me frankly. "At some times you have the good mind, at others you appear more like the mentality of a low manual laborer. If your mentality is not actually high, the tensal will do you more harm than otherwise by abandoning part of the control of your mind. It is as I have said of those with small criminal tendencies on Murashema. If much knowledge were stuffed into your head by means of the tensal, you might become nothing but manual laborer with plenty of useless knowledge. You are a special case, unlike our own people. I would not really recommend it, although you may attempt it if you desire."

  And so we rushed onward through space to the point where we would turn back and make for Murashema at a speed impossible for the ordinary man even to imagine. Saturn was on the other side of the sun * just double the radius of its orbit distant from us and my hope of seeing at close range the rings one sees in every picture of the planet was vain.

  * It is possible to check the positions of these planets in their orbits at the time Schierstedt says he passed them. Astronomical calculations show that a couple of months after he disappeared from the cottage on Sunderland Lake, they were exactly in the positions he mentions—a valuable piece of evidence as to the veracity of the manuscript.

  But we passed Uranus fairly close, though the angle with the ecliptic at which we were traveling made it appear below and behind us at the very moment when we made the great turn. There it lay, clearly bigger and brighter than any of the stars, a sea-green demi-lune of light, magnified to impressive size in the telescope, with the two inner moons close by tugs around an ocean liner. The color of the huge planet pulsated and moved as though internal convulsions of intense fierceness were agitating it. Ashembe shivered a little as he pointed it out.

  "A dead world," he pronounced. "You see the movement upon the planetary surface? At the temperature of this planet all known substances are at least liquids, even hydrogen and pleci, and there is constant chemical interchange between substances that are chemically inert gases in our worlds. You know, of course, that advances in temperature up to a certain time promote chemical activity, but soon arrive at the point where chemical combinations will not form, as in the suns?"

  I said I had heard something of the kind.

  "Good, then, the gases of our atmospheres at the temperatures of our worlds are at temperatures too high to permit of chemical combination except in cases of unusual excitement. Upon this planet (he indicated the careening ball of sea-green) all the gases have sunk to temperatures where chemical combinations are normally possible. Activity is intense."

  "But," I asked, "might there not be forms of life suited to such conditions?"

  "A thought," he said, "that has occurred to our philosophers, and promotes discussion, as does also the question of whether there are forms of life able to exist at high temperatures like those of the suns. But if there are such forms of life, they are imperceptible to any of our senses.

  So, for practical purposes they do not exist."

  I do not remember the rest of this conversation on life exactly, and my diary for the date is silent on the point. The reason is, no doubt, that it was that same afternoon that Ashembe, after making careful observations from all the screens, shut off the power at the base of the car except for one motor, which was turned to its full strength, the motor at the bow being turned on simultaneously.

  Through the screens I watched the stars, expecting to see them swing in a slow, wide arc as our craft swung around and squared away for the long trip to Murashema. On the contrary there was no visible change.

  It was not, indeed, till several hours later, when I had returned from a nap, that I could see any change at all, and then only a tiny one—less than takes place in the heavens during a single hour of night on Earth. "Aren't we making the turn?" I asked.

  "Certainly," was Ashembe's cheerful reply. "Do you not notice the difference? We are going at high speed, but we have already swung three degrees, thirty-six minutes of the arc. That is quite sufficient speed of turning to carry us in the correct direction."

  With this encouraging comment, he plunged back again into the maze of observational instruments and calculating machines, and for the whole of the next six or seven days I could draw little from him.

  It was not until January 6, year 2, that he at last laid down his calculating machine with a sigh, and turned the rest of the base motors on, one by one, shutting off the one at the bow that had been the brake on our progress. "All is complete for the present," he said, and then, pointing to the picture of a bright and brilliant star near the base of one of the bow screens, asked, "Do you know what that star is?"

  There was nothing remarkable about it except its unusual brightness. "Neptune?" I guessed, "or Sirius?"

  "Not either. That same star is your sun."

  I gave a cry of surprise. "So far away already?"

  "Ah, you forget. We have now practically escaped from its gravitational attraction. Your sun moves through space at a rapid rate. We also now move through space at a rapid rate in a direction nearly opposite. Therefore we achieve a great distance of separation."

  We were launched at last on the wilderness of interstellar space.

  IX

  THE MONTHS that followed were divided almost evenly between periods of intense labor and periods of intense boredom. Every ten hours we took observations (I soon learned to assist Ashembe in this work), made calculations of speed, distance and direction, and translated them into action by cutting off the power of the motors on this side or that.

  This done (it was far more arduous than it sounds) there was nothing left but study or amusement with Ashembe's three-dimensional chessboard. More and more I came to wonder at his mental equipment. For something over two years he had been shut up alone in a narrow car the duplicate of this, practically without occupation, on a voyage not toward his home, but to an unknown destination, whose terrors he could only guess at, and from which he ran about an even chance of never returning at all. He had come through that ordeal with sanity and cheerfulness unimpaired, and now here he was debonair and happy, attempting a second such leap.

  Sometime after we made the turn, Ashembe announced that as the fuel in the outer shell wa
s exhausted, he would cut it loose. He scrambled into his atotta suit, and taking the destructive flash, let himself through the inner compartments. Within an hour he was back, bidding me look through the screen at the base.

  I saw a dark object of uncertain shape fitfully outlined against the stars behind us, following on with a velocity but little less than our own.

  "The outer shell," I was told.

  The acceleration by this time was approaching the dizzy heights predicted by Ashembe at the beginning of the trip, and one day, after making his observations, he stepped briskly to the motors at the base of the projectile and turned them all off, announcing that we had reached a speed sufficient to carry us the rest of the way without further acceleration.

  In those hours of spinning down the grooves of space, a miniature universe in ourselves, motorless and silent, I learned how false were all my ideas of interstellar travel. In the scientific romances of Jules Verne, in the lunary adventure tales of H. G. Wells and of their successors, it is only sufficient for the painstaking scientist to construct a space car. As if by magic he is whisked from one world to another and plunges at once into a set of new and thrilling adventures. I have never found in one of them a word of the intense boredom of such travel, besides which the accumulated boredoms of Earth are as nothing.

  In the romances, the space traveler passes his time agreeably enough. He is entertained by the glittering conversation of his companions, by dazzling scientific explanations of what he had thought impossible, by sights and sounds and wonders of the universe beyond the Earth. (An exceptionally crowded universe it is, too, in the books.) Forgive me for insisting upon the point, but nothing could be more inaccurate. I set it down because the point deserves emphasis.

  I have recorded here practically every word of importance that passed between us, omitting only such matters as "Please pass some more of that green stuff. It isn't bad," and "Well, p equals 4.74 times v prime minus v, divided by V sine lambda, doesn't it?" Aside from these minutia of our everyday life and the conversation that centered around cubical chess, there was absolutely nothing to talk about. Subjects for conversation were as lacking as they would be in a shack in the Arctic Circle, and talk as infrequent. One is almost totally thrown in upon one's own resources. Imagine the few scraps of conversation of which I have given examples, lasting two human beings for the whole duration of three years!