It seemed as good a time as any to tell him about Dana and myself. He heard me with pleasure, and with no great surprise.
“I am glad, Kerry. I deeply and heartily approve.” He laid his hand on my shoulder. “It is best and fitting that you should become my son, as Dana is my daughter. For one day you must lead this little band. I am an old man. I will not always be here to guide, encourage and instruct. You are best suited to the leadership I must one day relinquish.
“So—my blessing on you both. But—”
He beamed. “We must have a celebration. A real one. I’ll prepare a special banquet, with music and dan—”
* * * *
—stood there stunned. Babacz rushed to the radio cabinet, frantically twisted dials. Uselessly. Where should have been voices was only the dry crackling of static. Where once had been music was silence. Our last, thin-drawn contact with Earth was gone.
My wife turned, and with a sob buried her head in my shoulder. I touched those dear bronze locks with hands that shook, and spoke to Frisbee through uncertain lips.
“It—it could be a technical fault, Professor. We are more than thirty million miles from Earth. Even Hertzian transmission can go wrong.”
He shook his head slowly, gravely.
“No, Kerry. Those last cries you heard, those last labored gasps, were the swan song of mankind on Earth. There will be no more messages from our native planet. Never. Not ever—in our lifetime.”
Harkrader said, “You speak with terrible assurance, Dr. Frisbee. As if you had known this would happen.”
“I did,” said Frisbee sadly. “Forgive me. Forgive me, all my friends, if you can. I did know it would happen. I learned the dreadful truth more than three years ago. That was when—and why—I gathered about me the children of this colony, and started building the Phoenix.
“I knew the comet would brush Earth this time. For a while I feared it would strike our old world head-on. Then I found the saving error in my calculations, learned that the head would graze, and the tail rake, the planet.
“It was not to be utter destruction, but it was bad enough. Once before, many thousands of years ago, a wayward comet grazed a civilized Earth. That civilization died. It took two thousands of decades to regain it.”
“I read about that,” said Babacz, “in one of the books we brought along. A writer named Bond, I think. But I thought it was only fiction. He wrote a lot of that stuff, most of it kind of crazy. I haven’t read all his books yet, but—”
“All fantasy is not sheer dreaming. Much is truth, much more is simple logic. All men knew Halley’s Comet was a potential source of danger. Or should have known if they had stopped to think. It almost brushed Earth on its last visit in 1910. Then, too, there were riots, outbursts of religious fanaticism, terror and awe. But to a lesser extent. To that extent which was a measure of the danger. Instincts are more sound than most men know. The very scope and violence of the Diarist movement was an indication that their fears were well grounded. They cried a day of judgment—and that day came.”
“If I had only known,” mourned Harkrader. “Frisbee, if I had known—”
“That is why I asked you to forgive me, John,” said our leader. “I knew, but I told none of you—not even Dana, my own daughter—for I knew what your reaction would be. As men of Earth, you did not greatly fear leaving your homeland. Not so long as you knew it was there to come back to. But if you had dreamed you were making a one-way voyage, a trip from which there was no return, you would not have come. You would have chosen to stay and suffer the fate of your fellow humans. So I deceived you.”
“The others, Professor. Shall I tell the colony?” That was Warren. As a proven leader, he had taken his place in our council. He was a fine chap. His ingenious handling of that snake-vine problem had made possible the building of New Eden.
“I think it would be better not to, Dick. They are happy here. They are even happier in their belief that we will one day return to Earth. Let us not disturb that happiness.”
“Dad,” said Dana suddenly, “a while ago you said ‘in our lifetime’! Do you mean by that the comet has not killed all life on Earth?”
“Exactly that, my dear. Many—perhaps millions—must have died in the first dreadful hours. The burning heat as the comet neared…the tidal waves and earthquakes…riots and panic…you heard about these before the messages ended.
“But man is a resourceful creature, and resilient. In Earth’s bowels are many refuges. Mines, caverns, grottoes—even such manmade havens as deep-sea submarines and diving bells.
“In all of these, human life will persist; also in remote corners of the globe untouched by the comet’s scourge. Lapland or Antarctica, Baffin Bay or Siberia. We do not know which face of Earth took the brunt of the blow, and which was spared.”
“Then,” I cried excitedly, “life will go on. And I think you are wrong, Professor. We can’t stay here now. Our duty to our world, its people, demands that we go back and do what we can to help them. We can repair the Phoenix. It was not altogether ruined when we crashed. In a month or two—”
Frisbee shook his head sadly.
“No, Kerry. I still have not told you all. There is one thing more my observations of the comet revealed.”
“Yes?”
“Its chemical nature. The elements that combine to form its gaseous envelope.”
Harkrader said tremulously, “You mean it’s—poisonous?”
“Not quite that, but the next worse thing. Unless my analysis is wholly in error—and from the dwindling gasps which were the last thing we heard from Earth I believe it is not—the gaseous composition of the comet was anesthetic.
“I think,” concluded Dr. Frisbee sadly, “that back on Earth our brothers sleep. Those who did not die rest in a drugged slumber that may last as long as a taint of the comet’s breath mingles with the air of our native planet.”
“Which may be—”
“Decades, Kerry.”
“But then they’ll all die! If they sleep and can’t feed themselves—”
“I think not. There is a rather obscure gas in the comet’s spectrum. Its peculiar property is that—”
* * * *
—walked to the door and looked out. The towering weed-like trees of Venus, tops mantled in the eternal mists of cloud, rose like a green wall about that tiny cleared area we had so hopefully named New Eden.
For the first time since our crash-landing I felt a dreadful loneliness, a helplessness, an insecurity and fear I had not known since that boyhood day when I had been selected as a cadet from my sector and sent to the Island to train as a Corpsman.
Somewhere beyond those clouds, invisible to us forever in heavens we never glimpsed, must twinkle a bright, green, glowing orb—the Earth to which we could never in our lifetimes return. For there men slept. And here…
Warren touched my arm. He spoke softly.
“He wants to see you, Kerry.”
I nodded and went back to his room. Dana was still there. She had been crying soundlessly. She read the question in my eyes and shook her head. I moved to Frisbee’s bedside, touched very gently the one hand unswathed in bandages. His eyes opened slowly and recognized me.
“Kerry. Kerry, my boy—”
“It’s all right, chief,” I said. “You mustn’t talk now. You must be quiet and try to rest.”
His words came muffled from beneath the gauze which encased his lips.
“There is no time for that now. The long rest lies before me, Kerry. Now I must know—”
He faltered, and I prompted him.
“Yes, chief?”
“The lodge. Was it completely destroyed?”
“I’m afraid so. But we’ll rebuild it. Already the men are clearing ground for a bigger and better one.”
“And the Phoenix? Did the fire ruin it, too?”
“It’s pretty bad.” I could not tell him how bad. I could not bring myself to tell him how the explosion of the auxiliary motor had seared and twisted the ship into a huddle of molten and fused parts.
“The supplies? The lab equipment? The seeds?”
“All saved, sir, thanks to you. We owe you a debt we can never repay.”
I think he tried to smile. His eyes smiled until a grimace of pain closed them briefly.
“It was my dream,” he said. “My colony. I want no payment. I have been repaid a thousand times over, seeing it grow and prosper. For here—” he said, and I felt that he was quoting an old, loved passage—“For here shall I hew a paradise out of the virgin wild, and I shall people it, and it shall be called the new Eden—”
“Father,” said Dana, “you must not talk any longer. You must rest, now, and get back your strength.”
He did not seem to hear her words. Once again his eyes were seeking mine.
“A new Eden,” he whispered. “A new chance for man, here on man’s last outpost. Kerry? Kerry, my son—”
“I’m here, chief.”
“There is one thing that troubles me. I have never mentioned it before, but now I must. The—children? There have been no children. We have been here almost half a year, but still there are no children.”
I glanced at Dana, and she at me. There was sorrow in her eyes, and a sort of terror. But when she answered her voice was strong and clear.
“Father—there will be children. Kerry and I…we have known…we wanted to surprise you. And others…some of the others, too.”
Frisbee’s voice was glad.
“Thank God! I was afraid it was the hard radiation aboard the Phoenix. Even in laboratories on Earth, sterility was caused by gamma rays. I feared the rays of space. All of us were sick, you remember. But I guess it was only temporary.”
“We’ll have a feast,” I said with forced cheerfulness. “When the first child is born we’ll all—”
“That was to be my next project,” he continued. “I think there is an answer to the gene injury caused by gamma rays. Once, in a series of experiments, I stumbled across a curious reaction. I found that pure vitamin A seems to stimulate the damaged regenerative cells. Not vitamin E, as might logically be expected, but the anti-xerophthalmiac vitamin A. I had intended to synthesize this vitamin, try injections—”
His voice was getting weaker by the moment.
“But there will be no need of that now. There will be children. The race of man will go on. I am content.”
He reached out feebly, in turn touching each of our hands. “Now I will rest,” he whispered. “God bless and protect you all.”
He closed his eyes. He did not open them again. I think, though, that his last rest was a happy one…
* * * *
When we had drawn the blinds and left the room, our need for acting ended. In my arms, Dana gave way at last to tears.
“Kerry, I lied to him. I lied to my father. I never did that before. But I had to, didn’t I?”
I soothed her as best I could. “You did the only thing you could do. He was happy at the end, believing your lie. Why should he know—” I could not keep the bitterness from my voice—“Why should he know his fear was based on truth? That there are no children…will not be any children…cannot be any children in our hopeless and sterile Eden.”
“But, Kerry—the hint he gave you? The injections of vitamin A. Can’t we try that? Couldn’t we—”
“Do you,” I asked her almost harshly, “know the formula for vitamin A?”
“Well, no, but—”
“And have you forgotten,” I cried, “that our entire reference library was destroyed in the fire that cost him his life? No, Dana, it’s no use. The race of man has turned its final milepost. Earth sleeps. And we of its last outpost are doomed to a slow but certain oblivion.”
She turned away then and—
* * * *
“—don’t say there is, but there could be.”
Babacz looked a little sheepish.
“I know I wasn’t supposed to take any from the library. But I did. Like I told you, I got kind of interested. Especially in those science-fiction stories. I guess Frisbee must have been, too. He had scads of them. And I’d transferred a lot, maybe half of them, to my own quarters before the explosion.
“I’m sorry if I did wrong, Kerry. I didn’t mean any harm. And when I heard what you just told Harkrader—”
“Wrong!” I cried. “Babacz, you may have committed the noblest crime in the history of the human race! Let’s see those precious books of yours. There’s a bare chance—”
* * * *
—most part utterly meaningless. Lurid, fanciful, melodramatic tales of adventure on planets of our solar system, and even on worlds many light-years away. Some are utterly ridiculous, like one that portrayed Venus as being a jungle world peopled by weird, intelligent, spiderlike creatures. He was a fool who wrote that story. Here we have found nothing so incredible as the life forms he invented. Only the echo-plants and the landfish are in any way foreign to our Earthly minds. I do not believe that, as Warren and a few of the others claim, the nightwalkers have intelligence. No vegetable thinks. And I’m sure their supposed “whispering” is just the rustling of the wind through their curiously cranium-like seed pods. But despite that we must repair that south gate. I don’t believe we should risk another accident like that which happened last week. It upsets the colony. Klein swears they attacked him…
But I was talking about the books. It is true that most of them are completely useless. They are silly romances in a frame of pseudo-science. But there are others which are more carefully conceived and written, stories which are based on hard and definite scientific facts. One of these could, just barely and possibly could, contain the clue we need.
Those writers, after all, had access to many books, to facts lost to us when our reference library was destroyed. If one of them—just one of them—had been inspired to base fiction tale on vitamins, and in that story had written the all-important structural formula for vitamin A—
* * * *
—her cheek against mine.
“You’ve got to come to bed, Kerry. You’re tired; I know you’re tired.”
Reluctantly I closed the book, tossed it with those many, many others I had plowed through in vain. The shelf of useless books was growing ever longer, the group in which lay our last hope was becoming smaller, maddeningly smaller. All but a few of the bound books I had read. There remained some old ones. Really old ones, I mean. Some of them were thirty or forty years out of print. The Professor had been quite a collector of that sort of thing. On Earth, in a happier day, his accumulation would have been prized by a museum.
“No luck?” asked Dana.
I shook my head. “None.”
“Perhaps they didn’t know,” she suggested. “Those books are very old. Perhaps in those early days—”
“Oh, they knew!” I answered savagely. “I’ve read a hundred references to vitamins. But never one notation of the actual formula. You see, that knowledge was commonplace to them. Why should they make special mention of details available in any standard book of reference?
“How could they guess,” I cried, “how terribly and desperately we need that simple fact? We have the raw elements here; we have the lab equipment. We can synthesize anything—but we don’t know where to begin in creating that one thing that can save our colony.
“The knowledge is lost. And we are lost unless the answer lies somewhere in these last few—”
Here, abruptly as it began, concludes the narrative of Kerry McLeod.
* * * *
I find it hard to explain my own (perhaps weakling) response to this manuscript, and to the demand of Dr. Arthur Westcott.
Let me say immediately and frankly that I
fear I am the victim of either an awesomely elaborate practical joke, or of the auctorial ambitions of a man now known only as a doctor.
I do not believe this narrative to be true. I cannot accept or endorse its facts, its theories, its completely implausible prophecy as to mankind’s future history and fate. These things are too fantastic. And yet—And yet a reading of my encyclopedia tells me that Halley’s Comet will revisit Earth in 1985. It tells me also that this baleful body’s last visitation in 1910 did foment religious hysteria, rioting and furor and (some think) the horrors of the first World War that followed closely after.
I remind myself that Grayson is an inmate of a hospital for the mentally deranged, and with this as reassurance, it seems relatively meaningless that his own script should be so different from that of Kerry McLeod.
Yet it is true that even as I write, foresighted men of good will throughout this squabbling world are arguing for a worldwide union of nations—a federation to be implemented by an armed international police corps. Is it absurd to fear that such an organization could rise and assume the powers of world government? I think not.
Still, I do not believe in this manuscript. But on one point I do agree with Dr. Westcott. That I dare not take a chance on the fallibility of my own judgment.
“You dare not refuse,” he told me. “For on its telling may depend the fate of all mankind…”
The last of all weird coincidences: my name appears in this narrative. That is flattery of a dubious nature, but it is a fact that forces upon me the obligation of presenting this tale under my by-line.
Because there is a slim chance that somehow this story may be true. Because there is a faint hope that the book in which this story is printed may be, still unread, in that dwindling pile through which McLeod so desperately searches.
Therefore—though I suspect that in so doing I am making a final and utter fool of myself—I offer here that clue you are seeking: the formula which may mean life or death to Earth’s last outpost.
The Space Opera Novella Page 12
