“Yes,” Alza replied. “Ijax told us that much. Of course, you never knew, did you?”
“Dopes—all of ’em.” Peter decided briefly; “but thank heaven we’ve got a bit of breathing space anyway.”
When they got back to the suite they found President Valroy awaiting them.
“I’ve made arrangements for a makeshift cover,” he said. “It is made up of three sections hastily fastened together—the only thing we can do at such short notice. A new one will be ready in time for full Moon. I’ve had to get the militia to cast it: the engineers refused the job. The trouble is that the militia don’t understand how to handle duraplex so they’re making it from the only metals they can find—”
“Doesn’t matter as long as it is a cover,” Peter interrupted.
“I’ve been giving further serious consideration to your statements, Excellence,” Valroy went on, “And the more I ponder it the more I can see the deadly possibilities of the atomic-force channels, though we were all led to believe they were to be used for cosmic power conversion, on an unheard of scale. I think, to make absolutely sure of safety, we should remove the moondust from the Tower top during the hours when the Moon is below the horizon.”
“Certainly that’s the surest way,” Peter agreed. “I’d have suggested it earlier, only I thought you’d never agree.”
“I’m taking a risk in believing you, Mr. Curzon. You must realize though—as no doubt you do from your speech to the people, which I heard over the radio—that labour is woefully short. There is only the militia to help us, and grudgingly at that. In the Tower bowl are many thousands of tons of moondust which, with labour so short, it will take us several days to move. But at least we can make a start. If Ijax should communicate—though I believe you when you say he won’t—there will still be enough moondust left in the Tower to satisfy the masses, who will of course demand that it be left open to the sky. On the other hand the sooner we get rid of the danger the better.”
“Good enough,” Peter assented. “I’m ready to start work this very moment.”
“I too,” Alza said. “I’ll change into overalls and come with you.”
“I’m working with you,” Valroy said quietly, “because I believe in you. And I’m alone in my belief, by the way. The Governing Council as a body looks upon the whole thing with profound disfavour, but it is prepared like the masses to give you a chance.... So I’ll go and prepare. Both of you meet me at the main airport in half an hour. By that time twenty freighters should have assembled, ready to carry the dust away to safe quarters underground.... Twenty,” the President finished, with a wistful smile. “If the workers were behind us we could have five hundred just as easily. Well, there it is.”
With a nod he departed and Alza followed him out of the room a second or two later. Peter too retired to get into working clothes and, as arranged, the girl and he met the President at the airport thirty minutes afterwards.
In another ten they had reached the Tower summit, the twenty helicopter freighters poised motionless above them with their screws whirring. Ankle deep in the blackish, slack-like substance, Peter, Alza, and Valroy, together with a corps of militia, got to work with electric excavators, and it was as they began to remove the stuff away that Peter got an insight as to the enormity of the job. There was a veritable small plain of the substance bounded by the solid metal walls of the hemisphere’s edge. And infinitely far below loomed the packed, yawning bulk of the city.
By nightfall, filthy and weary, their hard work and the constant coming and going of the planes had made perhaps a foot of difference in the moondust’s level—then at the approach of moonrise they had to stop. The planes lowered the makeshift cover into place and with that for the time being work had to cease.
True to their promise, the workers made no attempt to interfere during the night and Peter and Alza, worn out from their exertions, slept in comparative peace with only two members of the militia left on guard. Then at dawn work resumed and proceeded again until moonrise, but the shortage of labour made the job immensely hard. There were still many hundreds of tons of the stuff to move.
So through the third day the excavators closed their mighty jaws, the helicopter-freighters absorbed the black, deadly stuff into their holds, and the group of men and one woman in the midst of the stuff in the Tower top toiled on...until two hours before the rising of the full Moon. Then to their relief. a giant breakdown helicopter arrived with the newly manufactured cover to take the place of the none too secure three-piece makeshift.
Peter, Alza, and the President ascended the cat ladder into the monster’s belly and watched the magnetic grapples being fixed into position on the huge cover. Another machine moved the makeshift cover, which, during operations, had been slid to one side of the Tower top.
Peter, watching anxiously, stared ever and again towards the distant eastern horizon where a slight cloud gathering was already tinged with dull silver from approaching Moonrise.
Then Alza gave a cry and pointed below, gripping his arm. With startled eyes everybody watched the makeshift cover overbalance on the Tower’s rim as the engineer raising it with the magnetic grapples misjudged the distance. It was too late to do anything. The three-piece circle of metal, disintegrating into sections as it went, sailed into space and went hurtling down into darkness.
“The damned blundering fool!” the President breathed. “That is what comes of trusting to military engineers instead of the proper men being here—and be careful with this one, if you value your life!” he added to the engineer in charge of the new cover.
“I will, sir, to be sure.”
The winches commenced to squeak. The magnetism came into action in the grapples and the great circle was lowered through the gaping doorway in the ship’s belly. It swung in space, brilliantly lighted by a battery of searchlights from the surrounding planes.
“Taking a bit of doing, sir,” the engineer said worriedly, with a quick glance at the gauges. “This cover isn’t duraplex—it’s a heavier metal altogether—the only stuff available at such short notice. It—”
He stopped and everybody froze as two of the grapples slid and crunched along the flat surface and then took hold again.
“What the devil’s the matter?” Peter demanded, his voice harsh with tension. “Isn’t the magnetism strong enough?”
“Barely, sir. That’s what I meant. The weight....”
Nobody spoke further: the situation was too tense. Working with infinite care the engineer lowered the cover still more until one edge was level with the Tower top. Two of the militia waiting in the moondust below swung the cover inwards until its edge was balanced on the Tower’s rim. Then the engineer began lowering the apposite side and the two men scrambled out of the depths, caught hold of the mighty cables and so climbed on to the top of the slanting cover itself.
“Gently,” Peter whispered, sweating. “Gently, for the love of heaven!”
Another grapple slipped horribly and the giant plate swung right off the edge and lost position completely.
“Damn!” the engineer swore. He snapped switches and controls and swung the cover inwards again over the Tower top, the two men of the militia standing on it like flies. Far to the east the Moonrise became silvery.
Then suddenly, without the least warning there was a resounding snap from inside the plane. Instantly all four grapples released their hold. In anguished horror everybody watched the cover strike the Tower edge with, resounding impact, flinging the two militia men off into space—then the cover, overbalanced on the rim, slid sideways with a tearing and grinding of metal, went spinning edgewise into emptiness and spun like a giant coin into the lights of the city below.
Motionless the party stared into void. Seconds later they heard the faint sound of the cover as it struck something solid. Then Peter turned stiffly.
“W-what happened?” he asked weakly.
“Fuse,” the engineer said, through dry lips. “The cover was too heavy and that ex
tra shock on the magnets when it swung off the edge after we’d balanced it was too much for the current—”
“The Moon’s rising!” Alza shouted huskily, pointing.
It was—a glimmering dome, the topmost edge of the full Moon.
“What do we do?” she cried, gripping Peter. “Both covers have gone and the moondust’s exposed. Peter...!”
Peter never thought faster in his life than at that moment.
“Use these planes as a floating cover,” he said quickly. “They must close in mass formation and stop the moonlight from shining down. We’ll get to work ia the shadow and try and clear what’s left of the moondust. Don’t suppose we can: but we’ll try. We’ll keep three machines separate for carting it away. Come on—”
“Can’t we lower a machine over the Tower top?” Valroy demanded
“Not big enough,” Peter answered briefly. “Besides, to block the moonlight entirely we’d need an exactly fitting cover. The merest touch of moonlight will be enough to set this damned stuff going.”
He dropped the cat ladder down and scrambled into the Tower bowl again, with the girl following him. Valroy only stayed long enough to transmit orders to the pilots of the assembled planes then he too descended. Knee deep in the stuff he, Peter, and Alza looked up as the planes moved as closely as possible, to form a shield against the Moon.
Peter groaned. “No use. Their tapering shape makes them unable to blot it completely and the air currents keep shifting them.... All right then,” he ended fiercely, “we’ll dig the rest of the stuff away even if it kills us!”
The excavators were lowered and began operations. Fast though they worked, though, it was obvious that the vast mass of moondust still remaining could never be shifted in tune. With the present labour available there was a whole night’s work.
As best they could the helicopter planes kept close together, but as the Moon rose higher—monstrous and perfectly round—some of its rays struck the moondust.
Immediately a curious glow spread across the stuff wherever the pale light touched it. A faint humming sound came forth.
“It’s started!” Peter gulped, staring at it. “It’s energizing!”
Stupefied, none of them could do anything but watch for a second or two.
The energy reaction, as Lanning had intimated, was slow. It would still be some time before the stuff had enough potential power to transmit it down the cables to the looming channels below. But once that happened—
“Carry on!” Peter said at last. “Try and separate the unenergized stuff from the rest. Maybe we’ll lessen the amount of material that way and it won’t get enough power to work—”
“But there’s hundreds of tons of it yet!” Alza cried, her voice weary with strain. “We just can’t do it! We’re beaten!”
She relaxed listlessly against the mighty curving wall of the bowl and drew her sleeve over her damp face—then her eyes moved from the noisy excavators and the backs of the struggling men to the Moon again. She frowned at it, looked harder, then straightened up sharply.
“What’s happening to the Moon?” she shouted.
The utter amazement in her voice made everybody look up—and they saw immediately what she meant. The brilliance of the Moon’s edge was paling into a coppery brown colour. Even as they watched it spread ever so slightly over the silver disk.
“What—what date is it?” Peter faltered, clenching his fists. “By heaven, is it possible that—”
“September Twenty-Eight,” Alza said.
“The Museum!” Peter yelled. “That machine I played around with! Remember? That Eclipse Forecaster! It said the next total lunar eclipse would be on September Twenty-Eight, and I’d forgotten all about it! This is it!”
“You’re right!” Alza’s voice was choked for a moment. “I remember now—and it’s a four-hour eclipse all told, with two-hour totality— That means—”
She stared up breathlessly at the copper tide of the penumbra stealing over the glaring ball.
“The sun’s reflection will he cut off partially for two hours and totally for two hours!” Peter shouted, nearly doing a jig. “We’ve got a fighting chance to get this stuff out! Come on!”
Their weariness gone, they all worked with the desperation of demons to remove the remaining material. The parts that had become energized had ceased activity now as the lunar rays began to fail. The copper red covered the whole disk gradually, then it darkened to dirty brown as the true umbra shadow slowly began its obliteration.
At twenty minutes after midnight the party stood ankle deep in some five hundred tons of moondust and stared up at the ghost a full Moon. The moondust was silent, powerless, the seventh octave solar radiation completely blocked..
“Two hours.” Peter panted, covered in grime and perspiration. “If we can’t shift five hundred tons in two hours we—”
He broke off, frowning, turning to search the sky. The drone of a multitude of heavy freighter machines was making itself heard. It grew louder, until across the wavering searchlights and drowning Moon there swept ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred freighter machines, swinging and hovering near the Tower.
Abruptly an amplified voice shattered the quiet.
“Ijax did not speak! We know now that you spoke the truth, Excellence, We’re here to help!”
The filthy scarecrow who was President Valroy grinned widely in the searchlights. Peter heaved a deep sigh, then found Alza with her arms round his neck, kissing him in excited relief.
“Okay, okay, later,” he laughed, pulling her free. “We’ve work to do, sweetheart— Come down here, you fellows!” he bawled. “We’ve two hours to shift five hundred tons!”
There was no time wasted. Dozens more electrical excavators were lowered. Workmen came swarming down cat ladders. The top of the Tower seethed with vast activity as the high sailing Moon, nearly extinguished, rode over them in the cloudless sky.
Side by side Peter and Alza worked so hard they had no time to talk. Their bones ached, their hands were scarred and rough, they had moondust in their hair, their ears, their mouths, their nostrils. But they went on. Planes kept coming and going continuously after transferring the moondust to underground dumps. At magical speed with unlimited labour and appliances and the threat of terrifying death as the price of failure the moondust was shifted....
The total umbra shadow waned and the copper brown of the penumbra reappeared. But half an hour before that copper brown was due to be replaced by the normal silver of the Moon’s reappearing edge the Tower top was clear, a spotless, inverted hemisphere from rim to rim.
Exhausted, Peter and Alza sat down together and stared into the sky. Around them the President and a small army of workers stood breathing hard, Very gradually, as they all remained silent, the fleeting shadow of Earth moved from the Moon and the first signs of pure silver crept into the violet sky.
Valroy turned from talking with the workers. He came over to where Peter and Alza were getting stiffly to their feet again.
“To say that we are sorry we ever misjudged you, Excellence, or Lanning, or you, Miss Holmes, is a poor apology,” the President said. “You all spoke the truth, and have saved us—with the connivance of Providence—from a ghastly death. I, on behalf of the Governing Council and the People of Metropolita and of the world wish to express our gratitude.... From being a figurehead you have become, through necessity, a real ruler. We would like you to remain in that capacity.”
Peter grinned through his dirt. “If you wish it, Mr. President, he observed, “although ruling people is not my idea of fun.”
The President bowed, evidently pleased with Peter’s decision.
“How will the atomic explosive be removed out of these channels?” asked Peter. “Won’t that be dangerous?”
“It can be done over a period of years, Excellence. It will have to be de-energized, a long but necessary process. The Ijax Temples will also be converted to something more useful and the idols will be destroyed.”
&n
bsp; Peter stared awhile at the returning Moon; then he put his arm about Alza’s shoulders. “Mr. President,” he said suddenly, “I have decided to appoint a consort to help me rule the world. Alza and I are getting married.”
The President smiled indulgently and turned away as the two embraced.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Worsley, England, in 1908, John Russell Fearn began his career as a fiction writer by writing science fiction novels for the then-leading American pulp magazine Amazing Stories. His first two novels, THE INTELLIGENCE GIGANTIC and LINERS OF TIME, had been serialized in the magazine in 1933 and 1935 respectively. Both these early classics were restored to print a few years ago by Wildside Press.
After his debut in Amazing Stories, Fearn had continued to write magazine science fiction, but by 1937 the market had expanded—and changed. Amazing Stories had been overtaken by Astounding Stories as the leading sf magazine, and had been joined by Thrilling Wonder Stories. The magazine field was in a state of continuing flux.
Fearn became a leading contributor to all three magazines, but had discovered that in order to continue to sell to constantly changing markets, he needed to be able to change his style, and to be versatile. With the encouragement of his American agent, Julius Schwartz, Fearn created several pseudonyms, which greatly facilitated his experimenting with different styles, and increased his sales chances.
Then in July 1937, Fearn wrote to his friend Walter Gillings (editor of Britain’s first sf magazine Tales of Wonder, to which Fearn was also a contributor) to reveal that he was planning to switch from science fiction to the wider detective story market:
“I’m turning my scientific angles to account in the production of a scientific detective for England. A book, by the way. Be two years in the making, I expect. Chief guy is a scientist, and solves all kinds of things that puzzle Scotland Yard. I’m trying to get out of the rut of Frenchman, Chinamen and what-have-you with this yarn. Guy will be something like Nero Wolfe, only he drinks tea, not beer.”
Slaves of Ijax Page 14
