The Space Opera Novella

by Frank Belknap Long

“But why did you build it under water, Professor?”

  “Can you think of a safer place?” demanded Frisbee. “Concealed as the Phoenix was, Intelligence got suspicious of me and sent Kerry here to investigate. If it had been out in the open—”

  He shrugged.

  “A safer place, he says!” grunted Babacz. “Suppose it had sprung a leak?”

  “Teofil, Teofil!” clucked our host. “A vessel that lets water in would also let air out. And that is one fault, above all others, we must not allow. Indeed, one of the main reasons for finishing the Phoenix under water was so we might adequately test its spaceworthiness.

  “You understand, of course,” he continued, “that we built the frame in the open. Then we sunk the shell and went on with our work.”

  I asked, “Why is it you’re showing us all this now, doctor? Why didn’t you let us into this section the time you first told us about the spaceship, and took us through it?”

  “A fair question, Kerry, simply answered. I wasn’t completely sure all or any of you could be trusted—then. Now I am satisfied you are with us.”

  “The way things are going, we’d be idiots not to be with you.”

  “This is the heart of the Phoenix, the nerve-center from which originate its most vital impulses. Until you were solidly allied with us, I dared not risk letting you see this chamber.”

  “We have said we are with you,” said John Harkrader quietly. “The word of a Corpsman—even of an ex-Corpsman—can be depended upon.”

  “I know that. That’s why you are here today. That is why I am going to teach you things about the Phoenix that even the earliest of my young followers do not know.

  “You three men,” continued Frisbee, “are our latest recruits, but in many ways you are our most valuable. Technicians, all of you, skilled professionals in your fields, you must be my aides and co-pilots in handling the Phoenix.”

  He glanced at us in turn.

  “Well, gentlemen? World events plunge to disaster. There is little time left to us. What do you say?”

  Babacz gave the simplest and most convincing reply, touching a red-handled lever on the control panel: “This here gadget, Professor,” he asked. “What is it for? And how does it work?”

  * * * *

  It was good for our sanity that in the ensuing days we had study with which to divert our minds from what went on in the world outside our little refuge.

  As Frisbee had grimly foretold, neither the Sackies nor the Corps could be called winners in the atomic battles raging throughout the world. If the destruction of a stronghold, the ravaging of an entire city, could be called a victory, there were victories for each side. But they are hollow triumphs wherein a salient is not taken but blasted out of existence, where the bomb dropped by a robot plane brings agonizing death to a civilian population ranging into the hundreds of thousands.

  I will confess that my own emotions were confused. I believed in Frisbee and trusted him. Yet I was trained on the Island, and in those earliest days my hope was that the Corps would put down the rebellion, restoring peace and order to a world gone mad.

  I will contend, too, that the Corps adhered to its principles. It did not—as did the Diarists—strike without warning. From its remote headquarters on the Byrd Peninsula it issued an ultimatum that key cities were to be bombed unless returned to Federation control within a specified time. These cities were fairly named, and the citizens were warned of the consequences of refusal. But they rejected the order scornfully. And at the expiration of the time limit, the bombs fell. Chicago died in a day, victim of a disaster even more terrible than that which had razed part of it a century before. Dublin and its half-million inhabitants disappeared in a red fungus. So, too, passed other admonished and defiant cities.

  Then came retaliation, swift and terrible. On the Island fell the bombs of the Sackies, on cities still held by Federation forces fell others. Civilization staggered as two blind and brutal giants trampled back and forth over the face of the globe, exchanging blows in a battle of mutual destruction.

  We saw New Orleans fall. The Sackies, triumphantly in possession of what had been Fedhed’s master station, telecast a remote of the bombing of the Gulf city. Through electronic eyes set in the robot bombers we watched the city rise from the morning mists, saw the bomb find its target, watched the stalk of lurid smoke burgeon with its flower of flame and death.

  Then, even as the news commentator boasted, “So falls another Federation fortress that defies the Brotherhood—a tremor shook the screen. The vision plate burned with an eye-piercing color more dazzling than white, and the image ended. Two hours later we learned that the first of four A-bombs landing on Manhattan had scored a direct hit on the TV tower. The old landmark of Radio City was now a tangled mass of steel struts and powdered masonry.

  My heart was with the Corps when the bombing began. It was sick for all mankind after a few days. And it was well, as I have said, that we had study with which to divert our minds from what went on in the world outside. Study and work. For there remained to us little time, thought Dr. Frisbee.

  “We have been lucky so far,” he claimed. “It would be foolish to expect our good luck to last forever. We are living now on borrowed time. A guerrilla battle in this sector…chance discovery by a band of pillaging Diarists…miscalculation of a ballistics engineer thousands of miles away…any of these could lead to our instant destruction. Our only hope for survival is flight. As soon as possible.”

  “How soon can that be, Professor?” asked Harkrader.

  “Possibly tomorrow. Surely no later than the day after that. We are laying in stores and supplies now as fast as we can. The fuel bins are filled, the motor is primed and ready. There remains but to finish loading, and to transfer my library from the house to the Phoenix—”

  “Books, too? I thought you were trying to conserve cargo space as much as possible, Professor?”

  Frisbee smiled thinly.

  “On nonessentials only, Kerry. A reference library may prove our saving weapon in the strange world to which we are going. Yes, I am taking the books. Not only those on technical subjects, but fiction, as well. Novels…poetry…plays…a sampling of man’s efforts in the world of dreaming. Had men read more and striven less for personal gain, what we seek now to escape might never have come upon us.”

  I shrugged and said nothing. He was entitled to his opinion, of course. But for my part I found no need of such soporifics. Novels and plays, silly rhymes by longhaired bards of bygone days—these had no place in my life. I was bred a Corpsman. We honor facts, not fancies.

  Babacz looked interested. But, then, Babacz is not a cultured man, an Academy graduate like myself.

  “Say, Professor, I’d like to get a crack at some of those books. How about letting me see that they’re transferred safely?”

  “A good idea, Teofil.”

  “All right. I’ll get at it right away.”

  Babacz left. We heard him outside calling together some of the crew members to help him. He got along well with those others, did Babacz. Better, I must admit frankly, than did Harkrader and I. It was not that they were not fine youngsters. It was just that—oh, I can’t explain it, exactly. But we were—or had been—Corpsmen. And Frisbee’s recruits were one and all from the masses.

  Still, they were needed. Frisbee had made that clear.

  “No, they are not the best educated of Earth’s present-day children,” he admitted candidly one night, “but they are the soundest. They are neither wards of the Federation, schooled only in the science of military politics, nor are they products of the inept public schooling system that today teaches nothing but blind acquiescence to authority.

  “These youths and maidens are my own students, handpicked and trained by myself. On them depends the success of our venture, not only in their generation but in the years to come.

  “T
he Phoenix,” he said gravely, “is the new Ark of mankind, built to escape the deluge of terror. From the loins of these sound children must spring a new race of freemen, bringing the best of Earth’s heritage to our far outpost on Venus—”

  That was when first I learned our destination.

  * * * *

  That night I walked again with Dana in the gardens. It was a night of no moon, but none was needed. The light of the comet was like the crimson of an August dawn, except that where the rising sun of summer is clean and fresh and promising, the comet’s lurid glare was sickly and foreboding. It was not hard to understand the superstitious dread of those who humbled themselves in sackcloth to its worship. Its awful presence, to an unlearned mob, could easily seem herald of the grim Day of Judgment, for the advent of which the Diarists had named their cult.

  Still, when we walked in the garden together it was possible to forget for a while the evil which had maddened the minds of men. The breezes of night were gentle and cool, and the accents of evening were sweet. By the hedge where first we had learned we were fated to be more than warring strangers, Dana paused.

  “It was here, Kerry. Funny, isn’t it? I hated you then—or thought I did. You were our enemy; you had come to spy on us. My only thought was to keep you here as long as I could, delay your report to your superiors. When you told me you must go, I could have killed you. But I had no weapon.”

  “You had a weapon,” I told her. “Your hatred was a weapon, and your scorn. Your hair and your eyes in the moonlight. When you struck me, and I took you in my arms—”

  “Must I make you defend yourself again?” she whispered. She raised her lips to mine, and there was no defense. There was only herself and myself, a oneness with the silence of the night…

  Later, we lay and looked up at the stars. Even the comet’s baleful glow could not occult the whole star-spangled bowl which is the sky. Dana drowsily recited the strange and magic names of the ageless constellations burning above us.

  “Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn,” she murmured. “Hercules, and Cygnus the Swan. They’re lovely, aren’t they, Kerry?”

  She was lovely.

  “Antares, the foe of Mars—” She pointed to a red star low on the southern horizon. “And that blue one is Vega, base of the gods’ own lyre. And, see? The brightest of them all, Kerry. There!” She turned my head, and I searched for an echo of the starlight mirrored in the copper of her hair.

  “Do you know what that one is, Kerry? The one that shines like a jewel? That’s Venus, my darling. Venus, who was the goddess of love. Could there be a better omen? We shall found our new empire on love.”

  I kissed her. There was much to be said for the education of Frisbee’s school, I was learning. Useless knowledge, perhaps, some of it. But rich and warm and filling.

  “And those other stars?” I teased her. “Don’t they have names? Or do they move so fast they can’t be named?”

  “Others? Move so fast? But the stars move slowly, Kerry. You can’t see them move. Only shooting stars, meteors—”

  Her eyes followed the direction of my gaze. Then a gasp broke from her lips, and she leaped to her feet, tugging at my hand.

  “Kerry! Those aren’t stars! Those are jet-flames—rocket planes headed this way. Hurry!”

  We started toward the house. But we were not alone in spotting the flight. The guard posted by Frisbee had seen it, too. Even as we stumbled awkwardly over green lawns made sallow by the blood-red rays of the comet, the silence keened with the moan of our warning siren.

  We had almost reached the porch when the first bomb fell. Not on us, or I should not be here to tell of it. Not even very close, thank God!—but close enough that its scream reached our ears like the far, faint cry of a wounded animal, the thunder of its blast numbing our senses. The earth beneath us rose and shook; we tumbled to the ground and clung there for a breathless moment, wondering dimly if there would follow another closer blow. A flaming radiance, a withering hell of heat…

  Then Babacz was beside us, screaming orders into our deafened ears.

  “This is it! The real thing. The Corps is hitting Fedhed with an all-out attack. The Sackies are striking back with every interceptor rocket they have and we’re caught in the line of fire! We’ve got to get out of here—fast!”

  “Out? But where? How can we—”

  “The Phoenix. It’s sooner than we planned, but the old man says it’s now or never. That’s our only chance.”

  We hit the ramp on the run. The tube was a riot of confusion—crewmen and workers of our little band scurrying, luggage-laden, to their assigned quarters aboard the Phoenix. Others elbowed their way back outside to pick up material as yet unshipped, being turned back at the entrance by Frisbee, who stood there urging, shoving, bawling, “No more! Get to your assigned stations! No time for another load!” His face was tense and strained. Some of its tenseness lifted as his eyes found us.

  “Dana! Thank God! And Kerry! I didn’t know where you were. The others reported you missing.”

  “Were all right. Harkrader aboard?”

  “In the control turret. Join him there. I’ll come as soon as the last one is in.”

  We hurried topside. Harkrader’s creased face broke into a smile of relief at our appearance.

  “Better strap down. The motor is warming. We take off as soon as Frisbee gets here.”

  I helped Dana into a percussion seat, saw to it that she was securely buckled for the blastaway, then harnessed myself into another of the chairs. I had just finished when a clang of metal signaled the closing of the last port. The thunder of bombing stopped abruptly. Until that moment I hadn’t been aware of its incessant din, but now there was an almost ominous stillness punctuated only by the thin sighing of the air replenishment system.

  I caught myself thinking with a curious detachment, this is impossible. This can’t be happening to me. It is a dream, a nightmare. I will wake in a moment—Then Frisbee was with us, moving swiftly to the pilot’s seat. As he buckled himself into the pressure chair his eyes offered each of us a brief message of courage and hope. He said no word. There was no word to say. All of us knew what he was thinking. To stay was certain death—but a death we could understand on a world we knew. To go was—

  We did not know. But the time had passed for fearing the unknown terrors of a strange world. It was too late to turn back.

  Frisbee touched a button. There was no sound, but a massive hand reached forth and squeezed my chest-crushing, grinding, driving the breath from my lungs. The blood burned and sang in my brain, blotted my sight. The darkness—

  CHAPTER V

  Here again the Grayson-McLeod manuscript breaks off. From this point on, the narrative becomes progressively more sketchy, more skimpy of details, more episodic, until its baffling and far from conclusive ending.

  I deplore this fact, but there is nothing I can do about it. As a mere medium for its publication, I do not feel it is my right to make other than those few changes of continuity and phrase permitted me by Dr. Westcott.

  The reader, therefore, must form his own determinations (as I have done for myself) as to the periods of time elapsed, the locales of the scenes so inadequately portrayed. And, above all, as to the meanings of these fragments.

  * * * *

  —water. But I thought it would hold out until we reached our destination, now only a week distant if Frisbee’s calculations were correct.

  There was no food problem. Fresh and tinned goods had been shipped in quantity. We were not eating much, anyway. Everyone aboard was queasy with the vague disorder that troubled me, an indefinable squeamishness that made us all half drowsy and irritable, a fever for which there was no medicine because it was not caused by a germ. Just a dry, parched fretfulness, like that you feel after lying too long on a beach.

  It was hard to believe we had been over four months in sp
ace. Looking back on it now, the wonder of those first excitement-filled days seems callow. Hard to realize that once we had gaped, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, at each new sight that offered.

  Now we were acceptant to the fact that the space we voyaged through was deepest jet, not the sun-swept radiance we had thought in our ignorance it would be. Now we marveled no longer at the glory of the firm, unwinking stars as seen in airless space, unblanketed by a stifling layer of atmosphere. We chilled no longer with terror when a flaming bullet as big as an earthly mountain loomed in our vision plates, boding to sweep us to oblivion in its furious, headlong chase. We had learned that in the vast emptiness of the gulf that stretches between the worlds, they are near neighbors which pass within a score of thousands of miles, and that the meteor so “closely” threatening us might be a full day’s journey distant.

  All this is not romantic, but it is true. I was a Corpsman; I was trained to observe and report the facts. Let the poets and dreamers sing of the wonders of spaceflight. I say simply and truthfully that the trip was uneventful; it was dull. There were no hours of day and night to dispel the monotony. Our ports looked out on a star-bright but everlasting night in which even the sun was but another burning star. One greater, brighter, then most, it is true, but still half the size it looks through Earth’s refracting mantle.

  We did what any group will do that must live under a single roof, within entrapping walls, for more than a hundred days. We worked, we studied, we played. We slept and we ate. We talked of what lay before us and, less often, of what lay behind. We learned to know our shipmates as we had known few men and women in our lives. We became friends with some. We did not permit ourselves to become enemies with any. In the civilization we must create, hatred must be a word unknown.

  And—since we were young and warm and alive—love rode the Phoenix with us. A boy and a girl, hands locked together, would come to Frisbee asking permission to marry. It was granted always, for as Frisbee said to me after one such ceremony, with a smile filled with understanding, “I will not argue the propriety of these marriages, on either a religious or a civil basis. But we have a new world to people, and one theological precept we must never forget: be fruitful. If mankind is to endure, we must be fruitful and multiply.”