CHILDREN OF THE VOID
William Dexter
PAPERBACK LIBRARY, Inc.
New York
DENIS GRAFTON STRUGGLES TO HALT EARTH'S FATAL
ORBIT INTO CATASTROPHE.
After Earth was devastated by a cataclysm, Denis Grafton and a tiny colony of survivors slowly begin to rebuild their world.
But suddenly and violently, Earth is dislodged from its orbit around the sun and plunged into a journey through space.
This chaotic voyage is shared with alien races—
The Beast-Men of Varang-Varang, The Wise Ones, the humanoid Virians, the super-mutant Naganis. But can Denis trust them to help? How can he discover who is friend and who is foe? Can he stop the runaway world?
Don't miss this exciting sequel to WORLD IN ECLIPSE
(Paperback Library/52-338)
PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION
First Printing: October, 1966
Copyright © 1955 by Peter Owen Limited
This Paperback Library edition is published
by arrangement with Peter Owen Limited.
Paperback Library books are published by Paperback Library, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Paperback Library” and associated distinctive design, is registered in the United States Patent Office. Paperback Library, Inc., 260 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10010.
I
Two days out from Earth,
June 1st, 1980.
Denis Grafton writing: Of all the date-lines I ever wrote under, this is the most fantastic. I do not even know whether that line, “Two days out from Earth,” is accurate, except aboard this Disc. If Leo Arabin’s theory of arrested space-time continuum in space is correct, we may be weeks or even months out by Terrestrial reckoning. But by our measure, here in the great black Nagani Disc, we have been travelling for two days. We shall find how that tallies with Terrestrial time-scales, only when we return to Earth.
We do not know when we shall return. We do not even know where we are going, for we follow a moving target. When we set out, two of our days ago, the planet Varang-Varang was rapidly approaching us. Now, it has swung in a great outward curve, and we are pursuing it.
Even now, we Terrestrial humans aboard this Disc can hardly believe that we have, for the second time in our lives, been snatched away into space. For this is, of course, for each of us, our second venture from Earth into the vastness of interplanetary space. Each of us—indeed, every living adult Terrestrial human today—has been forcibly taken from Earth at some time in his or her life, to become a captive of the alien life-form that ruled the planet Vulcan.
I myself was snatched up by the “Flying Saucer” that terrified Britain in 1963. Others had been taken prisoner long before that; still others may have come later. But none came after September, 1973, for in that month the premature explosion of the Vogel thorium bomb demolished human life—and most animal life of any description—on Earth.
And out there on Vulcan, the planet long believed by astronomers to lie somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, we learned of the catastrophe. Thanks to the incredible efficiency of the system of television—I call it that for want of a better word—perfected by the Nagani, we saw Earth in close-up on the televisor screens on Vulcan. And beside us our fellow-captives, the Virians, suffered as we suffered at the sight, for their ancestors had seen their world demolished in remote ages past.
Our masters, the Vulcanids, those terrible sentient quasi-vegetable creatures, had sent us back to Earth. They had not done so from any motive of pity or kindness, but only from a coldly scientific need to know whether a depopulated Earth would yet support life. Earth, they planned, was to be theirs, for Vulcan was a dying world. We defeated them, though. They had harassed us sorely during our first years back on Earth, but with the help of the Nagani we were able to rid ourselves of the vegetable monstrosities.
I have often wondered about the Nagani; so have we all, for the matter of that. These little, industrious creatures—they stand no higher than thirty-six inches at their tallest—are alien, but benevolently alien. At first, we were repelled by their appearance, but now we are used to that. Are they reptilian, batrachian, or mammalian? We do not know, though we have lived alongside them for years now. Where do they come from? Again, we do not know, beyond the fact that they have lived on Vulcan for a long, long period. They have reptilian characteristics, but their features are frog-like. They wear garments and walk erect, yet I do not think they are near enough to the mammals to be bisexual. We have accepted them, and perhaps some day we shall learn more about them.
The Virians are a different matter, though. We have positively identified them as a brother-race to humanity, and their traditions convince us that their race and ours sprang from the same stock, sharing two planets between us. The last remnant of their world—Ama-Viri—is still to be seen in our sky, in the shape of our Moon.
At some unknowably early stage in human development, some stage aeons before even pre-history, the human race must have enjoyed a civilisation vastly superior to that of the Twentieth Century. Our remote ancestors, before they degenerated into troglodytes and savages, held the secret of space travel. The proof? It lies in the existence today, side by side with us, of the survivors of the Virians.
And now we find ourselves united, with the Nagani, in our mission to Varang-Varang. I ask myself, at this point, a question: What would Twentieth Century astronomers have said to the suggestion that the planet Varang-Varang existed within the orbit of Mars? The answer comes easily. They would have denied its presence. And they would have had good reason for doing so. For Varang-Varang, as we now know, has been unaccountably invisible for thousands of years, until . . .
But let me pick up the threads of my narrative.
Our return to Earth from Vulcan, in 1974, to find mankind destroyed by the Vogel thorium bomb, and our efforts at rebuilding a human civilisation, have been described in an earlier narrative.* When I closed that record, I would have been content to put away my typewriter for good. Now, but a month after the account was completed, we have found that our small human colony could not look forward to the years of peace for which we had hoped.
* “World in Eclipse”
The sudden flaring into prominence of Varang-Varang’s disc told us that the grim planet, for so long a dark enigma to the Nagani and the Virians, had shifted its orbit Its increasing size inevitably meant that it was speeding towards Earth; and the tradition of ages among the Nagani commanded that they go out and meet this new peril.
They, and the Virians (whom we have proved to be human) knew that the inhabitants of Varang-Varang were almost as great a menace to each of our races as had been those gross creatures of Vulcan, the anemone-like Vulcanids. For centuries the Beast-men of Varang-Varang had been a dreadful legend among both Nagani and Virians. Now they, and their globe, approached our own newly-populated Earth.
For the Virians among us, those bronzed, gallant men without a planet of their own, we feel especially sympathetic. We had hoped to share our Earth with them and the Nagani, but if this expedition fails and we do not return it will be only our wives and children and their descendants who dwell on Earth.
The frog-like Nagani, even though we now appreciate and admire their incredible talents, do not affect us in the same way. They are so completely alien to anything humanity has ever known that we cannot yet understand their emotional reactions, and so cannot decide whether to lament their lot or to envy them their detachment.
Twenty days, the Nagani have warned us, would bring us to to the spot occupied by Varang-Varang when we left Earth. But the planet’s runaway orbit has altered all that. Now, if the parabola is continued, we may find months of pursuit ahead of
us. Until we can establish the extent of the new orbit, we can make no calculations as to the future.
Let me describe now the Disc in which I and eight other Terrestrials find ourselves.
There is, of course, a Nagani crew, but we rarely see more than two of these at any time, and that not often, so there is little I can say about them.
The Disc is one of those enormous black space craft in which the Nagani came to our world, and is far bigger than the graceful, gleaming golden Discs in which we ourselves were ferried from the space station on the remote side of the Moon nearly ten years ago, after our release from captivity on Vulcan.
The black Discs are capable of crossing immense distances, we understand, without the use of a space station such as that behind the Moon. Already, after only two days, the Moon appears bigger than Earth, and I understand that once we have passed the gravitational and magnetic field set up by the Earth-Moon combination we shall travel at much higher speeds.
For us Terrestrials and for the Virians, accommodation in this Disc is cramped, constructed as it is for beings whose height seldom tops thirty inches. Since coming to Earth, though, the Nagani have made a number of changes in the interiors of the Discs to allow for passengers of greater height than themselves. There are many parts of the interior which we can only see through the low sliding hatches, and which we cannot enter because of their low ceilings.
One such out-of-bounds region is the set of cabins around the control centre. Natural curiosity has driven us to inspect this as thoroughly as we can.
But even closer inspection would show us little that would be comprehensible to human intelligences. All the cabins have a strange glowing panel on each wall, with a crazy network of pulsating, shining threads upon it. At times, the nodes where the thread-like lines intersect leap into prominence and glow with a colour I cannot match with any Terrestrial colour. This system may be a highly advanced form of our own radar, though drawing its power from no source that I can recognise.
We have lived side by side with the Nagani for some years now, and begin to appreciate that their methods of tapping natural forces are not only ahead of ours in conception and execution; they are completely and utterly different. As an example I cite the form of power that propels these Discs across space.
The Discs utilise what we used to call the stellar drive, tapping the magnetic fields that exist throughout the Galaxy. There are also, I am assured, etheric forces at their command, but these I cannot attempt to describe.
The etheric drive is used only in the gravest emergency. I believe that it operates by what could be called vibrational projection. In other words, the vibrations that go to make up a material body are projected to a distance, as much as the image on a cinema film once used to be projected from the operating box to the screen of a theatre. The speed achieved by the etheric drive might surpass the speed of light, though by how much I do not know. But I believe that to match the speed of light would destroy the theory that a body cannot be in two places at the same time. Call it dematerialisation and materialisation if you like.
Since I started writing this account (which will be closed I do not know when) our speed has increased greatly, and now we have shot outside the Moon’s orbit Below us, as we can see on the televisor screens in our compartment, the Moon is occulting the Earth.
Even as I write, the Moon has dwindled in size and the Earth is becoming visible around the edge of the Moon.
Arabin and Krill Hvensor have now adjusted the controls of the televisor so that our field of vision has swung forward, in the direction in which we are going. Before us lies the dead black field of the spatial void, sprinkled with innumerable points of light. Our screen is capable of considerable magnification, but so far we have not been able to bring this into play. There is probably some form of remote control operated by the Nagani which throws this aspect of our viewing out of our control.
My fellow-passengers are Leo Arabin, who has been constituted our leader since our small party returned to Earth from Vulcan; Casimir Karim, the Egyptian; Otto Langer, our medical man (we decided to leave Dr. Axel Bjomstorm behind us on Earth, where in these days a surgeon and physician is indispensable to our tiny population); Harry Crow-Eyes, the Blackfoot Indian with the university degree; Isidore Lopez, the former stevedore from Barcelona; Fernand Ducrot, our scientific student, who has become an invaluable aid to us in these last few years; and David Cohen, the former London taxi driver who has been our constant friend since our return from Vulcan.
The Virians aboard include Kirill Hvensor, our main link with the other members of his race who were able to escape to Earth with us from Vulcan. Those mechanical geniuses, Alatto Skirr and Hani Skirr, also share our accommodation, and with them is Adda Manganna, who came to us as envoy with the Nagani fleet that followed us to Earth, and who was the means of convincing us of the good intentions of the Nagani people. We have with us also, Karinga Varga, the Virian with the incredible power of telepathic communion with animals.
The Virians, are, of course, essentially human beings. At some remote and untraceable age in the past, Terrestrials and Virians shared the same world. When we separated from them, they maintained Earth’s twin planet, Ama-Viri, as their home world. Later they were enslaved by the now extinct race of Vulcanids before their own world was destroyed.
Even as we crossed the orbit of the Moon—which is one of the last remnants of their own shattered world—the Virians paused, hands crossed on chests, and described that curious spiral with the foot that is the outstanding gesture of their religion.
Where are we going? It is impossible to say, but we hope to have some sort of course plotted within the next few days. By then we shall have some idea of the course being pursued by the runaway planet, and may be able to direct our Disc towards a point that will intersect with Varang-Varang’s crazy orbit.
We do know, however, that we are heading for the outer reaches of the Solar System. Minute by minute our Disc is accelerating on a course that is taking us steadily away from the Sun. Within the next twenty-four hours we shall have accelerated to a speed which would have been deemed impossible by Terrestrial physicists. Adda Manganna brings us the information from the Nagani control cabin that soon we should be making a speed of no less than 180,000 miles an hour. To the best of my reckoning this should bring us into the orbit of Mars in less than fourteen days. At such a speed, the orbit of remote Pluto could be reached in less than 40 days—a terrifying thought.
Since taking part in this enterprise I have felt a deep regret that none of us is equipped with necessary scientific knowledge to render this account of full value to those who may read it— if, indeed, it is ever read by any human.
It is possible that a human with the right background of astro-physics and such sciences as electronics, atomics, optics and the like would be able to extract much intelligible data from what is going on at this moment around us. True, the Nagani systems of thought are profoundly alien, and much of them would never, I believe, be understandable by human minds. But I am sure that some glimmer of truth might be perceived by a properly trained mind. It is man’s never-failing inquisitiveness that prompts me now to deplore the fact that neither I nor my comrades have more than an inkling of knowledge about the Nagani secrets of interplanetary flight.
Leo Arabin, looking over my shoulder as I write, suggests that I might truthfully have written “interstellar” instead of “interplanetary.” From conversations he has had with the Virians he is sure that the Nagani hold the secret of the road to the stars lying remote light-years outside our own System.
(Interpolated by Arabin: I know it. How else, without the secret of interstellar travel, could the Vulcanids have reached our Solar System? According to the Nagani, these monsters originated on a satellite planet of some star in the nebula in Orion. If I were back on Earth I could check by reference books just how far outside our System that is.)
Arabin’s comment reminds me of the man Lawrence Bag-got, who led half
a dozen of our people in an insane interplanetary venture with the last of the Vulcanids. He may still be alive somewhere. The Virians, who are accustomed to the small Discs such as the one taken by Baggot, declare that these inadequate craft could never travel as far as Varang-Varang. They were used more as ferries between the Lunar base and Earth, and were not constructed for the vast distances of space.
Shall we ever meet Baggot and his friends again? Truth to tell, none of us would regret it if we never met him again. He was, to say the least, a disturbing element among our friendly little community while he was with us. His mad political creed would have endangered our existence before long, had he stayed with us.
Our televisor screen now shows us the shining half-ball of Earth, with half the planet in darkness. There is little that one can distinguish in the way of landmarks. The atmospheric veil obscures much, though it is just possible, at times, to discern that the massive coast line of Africa occupies the brighter portion of the globe. Away to the North (it is upside down to us: there can be no North or South, East or West, in space) lies a blur that is Europe.
We try to be matter-of-fact about this sight of our home planet, but we cannot help asking ourselves whether we shall ever see it at closer quarters again.
An amazing thing has happened! As though someone in control of the screen could read my thoughts, an amplified1 vision of Earth has sprung on to the screen. There, shimmering under the 500-mile depth of atmosphere, we can see Europe. The shifting of its outlines at this distance makes it look like a relief map under water.
We know, of course, that the stereo-link system of radio vision (I can never bring myself to call it television, so vastly advanced is it, compared with our old system) can bring a three-dimensional picture from almost limitless distances with great clarity. But the reception systems in these black Discs of the Nagani are somewhat different. They could be compared more with our radar, save that they give the alternative of either a flat picture or a stereoscopic field showing the customary “blips” of our radar.
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