Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  “Yessir!”

  Rusty said, “Look, Baldy—when we get there, tell ‘em like I just been sayin’, huh? About bein’ kind o’ gentle with the ‘Ranies, remember? Honest, I think that’s the smart way to—”

  “To find out,” snorted Harrigan, “which is hottest, Hades or Mercury! I’ll tell them nothing, Rusty. The Patrol knows what it’s doing. Now, look—you’re in command of this dump while I’m away. Do a good job of it, and I’ll enter you for a credit boost next period. Keep the men working on them wore-out drain pipes, and see that Slops don’t make soup with the dishwater.

  “And put the stiff on that big soft heart of yours! Lapsley and Youst are supposed to be serving punishment hours in sol; don’t go throwing no pink teas or parties for them—understand?”

  “Aw, Baldy—”

  “Are you going to do like I say? Or—”

  “Sure, Baldy. Only gosh—”

  “All right, then. Sparks, get the lock room. Well, Hogan, that you? Got that stuff ready? Okay. I’ll be right there. Okay!”

  He shoved a beefy paw in Peters’s direction.

  “Carry on, fella. Be seeing you!”

  Then he was gone.

  ~ * ~

  Through the radio-room wall plate, Rusty watched his friend’s motosled nose from the ground lock, swing in a great circle to catch the guide beam, and scud eastward over frost-silvered terrain. The incessant snow was like a great, thick veil, first dimming the outlines of the sturdy skier, the one type of mobile unit practical on Uranus’s frozen bosom, then hiding its form entirely. When solid white had obliterated even the tiny red dot of the exhaust, Rusty turned, a still-unanswered question in his eyes.

  “I don’t get it, Sparks. I don’t get it nohow! It don’t make sense for the Patrol to issue such an order unless they— Look, you know what day tomorrow is, don’t you, maybe?”

  The radioman looked helplessly at his audio banks.

  “Tuesday?” he hazarded.

  “I know it’s Tuesday,” said Rusty. “I mean—what day of what month? Earth figgerin’?”

  “Well, it’s like this, Rusty. I’ve been out here a long time. We don’t have much contact with the Outside, you know. And I tried to keep a diary for a while, but, well you know how it is. The days sort of slip by and—”

  “In other words,” complained Rusty, “you don’t know. When I got you for a helper, a huluva git I got! It must be some day special to make the Patrol decide—”

  Again his eyes sought the quartzite view pane. And then suddenly he gasped. Gasped and chortled, a great roar of glee bursting from his lips.

  “Of course!”

  “Huh?” said the startled Sparks.

  “Why, sure! Now I know. Sparks, I’m ashamed o’ myself! Of all of us. We musta left our finer instincts behind us when we left Earth!” His eyes sparkled with excitement and swift decision. “Sparks, hop the ditty! Audio the workshops, the labs, the rec rooms. I want every man under the dome to be in the auditorium in five minutes flat!”

  The radioman looked at him dubiously. “But Harrigan said—”

  “Harrigan said I was in command, didn’t he? Now, are you gonna do like I say, or—” Almost as an after thought he offered the alternative —”or do I have to yank off your head an’ shove it down your throat?”

  Sparks said, “I’m doing it, Mr. Peters,” and got to work on the plugs. Rusty rubbed freckled hands together. He had swallowed his chaw some time ago. He would discover that fact later, to his great embarrassment. But right now he was beaming with delight and enthusiasm.

  “Ever since they made me assistant warden here,” he gloated, “I been tryin’ to tell the Earth authorities that we ain’t no ordinary prison, here at P. C. 1. It’s punishment enough for the men to be eighteen hundred million miles from home, without they should also be treated like scum.

  “Baldy an’ me managed to convince Inspector Wegland of that, the time he cracked up on the steppes. But now we’ve got a chance to prove to the whole damn Universe that, cons or no cons, the inmates of this jug is human bein’s. Complete with feelin’s an’ ee-motions.

  “Sparks—where was the nearest native hide-out, last time you heard?”

  “Not far from here. Scar Mountains. A half-hour’s run.”

  “That’s what I thought. So we’re lots nearer the ‘Ranies than the Patrol is. Which makes my ideer a lallapaloozy. Now, look, Sparks. Here’s what we’re gonna do—”

  ~ * ~

  Colonel Cochrane of the S. S. P., grim, gray, glorious with medals betokening his valor in a half hundred segments of the Universe, stopped talking and studied the faces of’ the men who had come to New Oslo in response to his summons.

  “Are there any questions, gentlemen?”

  Warden Pat Harrigan coughed nervously. He rated as a captain, but he was fully aware that his was only a semimilitary rating. He smoothed a sweating palm over his barren pate.

  “Ain’t this—” he began, and stopped, flushing, to begin over again. “Isn’t this a sort of ruthless way to work on the ‘Ranies, Colonel? After all, like one of the guys in my outfit—my assistant, Rusty Peters —said, Uranus used to be their planet. Till we come here. Maybe we ought to be gentle with them. Negotiate, or—”

  Cochrane frowned, and a half dozen of his underling officers obediently masked their faces with disapproval.

  “Negotiation has proven fruitless, warden. The Uranian natives are a sullen, dangerous, treacherous lot. It is our task to put an end to their periodic uprisings. Force is indicated; force concluding in utter annihilation should they show resistance.”

  “But if you want peace—”

  “That is exactly what we want. But since they will not sign a peace pact, we will adopt the more stringent means of ending hostilities.” Cochrane’s chest lifted. “And it is altogether fitting and appropriate that tomorrow should bring Uranus into the family of solar children. A date revered by all Earthmen, hallowed in our annals, celebrated by Earthmen the Universe over—”

  There it was again. Baldy said, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. Tomorrow’s the . . . er . . . er—”

  “The nineteenth of November!” said Colonel Cochrane proudly. “The day we celebrate. Empire Day!”

  “Hell!” muttered Harrigan under his breath. “Sure! Empire Day!”

  He should have guessed it. He should have remembered the moment he saw the message calling him to this meeting. The nineteenth of November was the anniversary of the day on which, some seventy-odd years ago, Earth’s military might had brought about the armistice and eventual peace that welded into a solid empire the four inner planets.

  Not without reason was it Earth’s greatest holiday. It had taken thirty long years, and millions of lives, and an unguessable wealth in craft and arms to bring about the union now governed so placidly from Earth. The Rollie Rebellion on Mercury, the Fontanaland uprising on Mars, the Twelve Years’ Siege of Venus City—all of these had come to a peaceful ending on November 19, 2238 a.d.

  That day, too, had ushered in a new era. An era of further exploration. Earth’s factories, able at long last to cease wholesale production of armaments, had delved into the problem of perfecting spacecraft. From their researches had come such things as the Wittenberg converter, the Holloway vacuum-feed chambers, the anatherms—and the frontiers once more began to roll back on before man’s onslaught of knowledge.

  Where once the planetoids had been a chaotic network of unplumbed mystery, frequented only by space scavengers and occasional pirate hordes, now it was a huge, charted, floating ore deposit for the entire Solar System. Jupiter had not been—nor could it be for countless centuries—conquered, but two of its satellites now gave refuge to Earth-ling colonists. In the outer rings of Saturn worked space placers, gathering to Earth’s wealth the valuable shards of what had once been two satellites. Uranus boasted its tiny colonies; Neptune was now being studied for a colonization project. And far Pluto was under constant electrono-mirror bombardment, that its icy
surface might some day be cleared.

  Empire Day! “The day,” thought Baldy, “the day we celebrate.” With a swift, devastating nostalgia he remembered his boyhood on Earth. The public gatherings in vast, buttressed auditoriums, the political speeches, the flag waving, the firecrackers and sandwiches and drinks, the parade of veterans, the evening spectacle of mock warfare in the vaulted lofts of Earth’s soft, blue skies—

  Empire Day!

  Colonel Cochrane was talking again.

  “—more than fitting that this day, symbolic of our great victories in the past, should also be the day on which we add Uranus to our list of permanent colonies.

  “And now, gentlemen, to the specific problem. Our scouts inform me that the headquarters of the Uranian native chief, Ras Tirl, lies in the caverns of the Scar Mountains. There we shall take our punitive expedition. Captain Mancum, you will lead Company A; Captain Larey, Company B—”

  Baldy said, “Pardon, sir—you said Scar Mountains? That’s right near P. C. 1.”

  “Yes, warden. That is why you were summoned to the staff conference. We will use the Colony as our base, in the unlikely event that our aims cannot be completed in one day. You will, therefore, send a message to your next-in-command, ordering him to arrange food and quarters for us.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Baldy.

  ~ * ~

  Rusty Peters looked with satisfaction upon the huge auditorium of P. C. 1. He had, he thought, done pretty darned well in so short a time. Four hours ago this had been just a meeting place. Now it bristled with equipment for the action to take place.

  He said, “Hm-m-m!” and rubbed his hands together. He said, “Well, that’s that! Slops, everything ready in the culin . . . the cuul . . . the kitchen?”

  The Colony cook nodded surlily. “Yeah. But if you ask me—”

  “I ain’t askin’ you,” said Rusty. And added piously, “An army travels on its stummick.”

  “So does a worm,” commented Slops.

  “Okay. An’ worms win in the end, don’t they? Now, Johnson, Bridges, Howe—you all set?”

  The three bulger-clad convicts nodded. Each bore a Traimers-Lincoln heat gun. Johson, the appointed leader of the trio, said, “We sled to their hide-out, kick up a fuss, get ‘em coming after us. And retreat slowly to the Colony.”

  “Right,” said Rusty.

  “Suppose they don’t follow us?”

  “Suppose Mercury has a snowstorm!” snorted Peters. “They’ll folly you. Them ‘Ranies has their faults, but they are the fightin’est fools I ever seen. They’d stalk a human from Hell to Hercules. Which is what ye’re bankin’ on. Because when they git here”—again he stared about him with tight satisfaction—”they bump into this!”

  Johnson looked dubious.

  “I don’t know, Rusty. It’s tricky business.”

  “Tomorrow,” Rusty told him succinctly, “is the day we celebrate. Fust, because it’s a holiday; second, because we’re gonna make the Rocketeers look like monkeys. Now, git goin’!”

  They got.

  It was scant seconds later that Sparks brought him the message from Baldy, ordering him to have everything ready for the feeding and quartering of three mechanized Rocketeer units. And Rusty grinned.

  “They,” he opined, “got a su’prise comin’. By the time they git here, the squabblin’ will be over. But we got to work fast!”

  ~ * ~

  Dull white monotony, endless and unbroken, accompanied the motosled in which he rode. Baldy looked at the chronometer on his wrist. Nine hours. Almost there. Shortly, through the white veil that shredded itself interminably against the foreshield, should appear the hoary crest of the Scar Mountains.

  It did. Sallow sunlight glinted feebly on towering crags that, through aeons of time, had never known the green mantle of vegetation. Around the topmost peak fingered pink and angry streamers of cold fire. An ionic storm in the upper atmosphere. Uranus’s Heaviside was weak; ever and again it broke down beneath constant cosmic bombardment, permitting those devastating, body-destroying radiations to burst through. Which was another of the many reasons frail man must live in domed cities carved out of the frozen wilderness.

  The ‘Ranies were of hardier breed. Spawn of a mad desolation, all-knowing Nature had supplied them with bodies able to endure infinite rigors. Yet even here, as man had discovered to his vast amazement, Nature had followed the same rough pattern of form that characterized highest life on all planets. The Uranians walked upright on two legs; from their upper trunks branched jointed arms equipped with hands; hands, six fingers, an opposed thumb.

  But there were differences, too. The Uranian sense of sight was an abortive sense. ‘Ranies could differentiate only between tons of light and dark, otherwise they were color-blind—as might be expected in a land of white snow and black night. Their eating apparatus was equipped with extrasensitive taste buds—a sharp necessity on a planet where the food supply was so limited. Their hearing was dulled by ages of exposure to howling gales and shrieking storms. They had no sense of smell, which was not strange, considering the fact that they did not breathe through the nostrils but respired into a network of subcutaneous lungs sponges through every pore of their bodies.

  “Which,” thought Baldy, “ain’t hard to understand. What with an atmosphere of ammonia and stuff—”

  The mean body temperature of the Uranians was a remarkable example of colloidal adaptability. Interior chemistry allowed them to withstand, naked, the biting frigidity of their native planet. Their garments were solely for the purposes of impediment portage and personal adornment. Yet they did not suffer in the least when brought into the domed cities of the Earthmen. They seemed impervious to heat and cold alike; their lunged pores breathed with equal facility their own poisonous atmosphere and the oxygenated Earth atmosphere within the domes.

  Baldy’s driver brought his sled to a curving stop as the column before him set the style. And already Patrolmen, bulger-clad, armed, were clambering from the convoy. A company began moving toward a narrow pass to the right. Harrigan sought the flag sled of Colonel Cochrane.

  “Colonel?”

  “Ah, yes, warden. This is the defile you mentioned, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Only there’s something funny. See them drifts?”

  “Well?”

  “They ain’t normal for this time of year. Ought to be solid instead of broken like that. This storm’s so heavy it covers tracks almost immediate, but—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it looks to me like the ‘Ranies is been on the march. And lately, too.”

  Colonel Cochrane said impatiently, “We’ll know in a few minutes. The first company is approaching the caves now. Reynolds—catch that signal!”

  A figure, dim in the heights above, was motioning to the commander below. The Signal Corps lieutenant watched intently. Cochrane watched the lieutenant, and Baldy watched the commander. An expression of surprise and alarm communicated itself to three faces, one after another.

  “Yeah?” said Baldy. “There is something wrong?”

  The lieutenant ignored him, made report to his commander.

  “He says, sir, they have entered the caverns. But they are empty. The Uranians have gone.”

  “Gone! But . . . but gone where?”

  Baldy, a wild surmise suddenly sweeping through him, had climbed to the top of a motosled. There was an old trick of hunters and trappers he had been taught in the Venusian jungle lands. It was the stunt of “spotting” a trail by the “pearl necklace” method. You got a little elevation, closed your eyes, opened them suddenly. Where, in woodland, a trail had once existed, there would appear a dim, thin, weaving line that would linger for an instant, then disappear. Perhaps the same trick would work even on a snow-covered terrain. Everything would be white, of course. But the trail should be newer, closer packed, broken; should show against the smoothness of unbroken drift.

  It did. Barely visible, disappearing even as his eyes strained to mark it
. But unmistakable in direction and—in meaning!

  “Colonel!”

  “Yes, Harrigan?”

  “They’ve marched,” said Baldy in a strangled tone, “on the Colony!”

  ~ * ~

  There was a jangling commotion at the ground lock. Bells rang, a siren screamed, the face of Hogan leaped to the visiplate before Rusty Peters.

  “They’re coming in, Rusty.”

  “Good!” Rusty tossed one last look about him, nodded. Everything was in readiness. The boys were at their stations. The auditorium had been set in order for the little “party” he was planning. The necessary items had been brought from the storehouse; every last man had been instructed as to the part he must play.