Captain Future 26 - Earthmen No More (March 1951)

by Edmond Hamilton

  “What form of execution would you prefer?” Otho asked him. “Being melted down for scrap or converted into a nice useful boiler? There’s a law against killing people, even for bucket-headed robots.”

  “Who said anything about killing?” boomed Grag. “He could have an accident, couldn’t he?”

  “Preferably a bad one,” grunted Ezra. “But I’m afraid that approach won’t do.”

  “No,” said Curt slowly, “but I think Grag has the right idea at that. I think we ought to go and talk to Mr. Lowther.” He sprang up. “Come on, Carey, this will interest you as a commentary on the brave new world you helped to build!”

  “I think I’ve seen enough of it,” Carey said. “I don’t want to see any more.”

  BUT he went with them. Only Simon Wright stayed in the ship. They took a car from the spaceport. Except that it had wheels and seats, it bore little resemblance to the cars Carey had known. Propulsion units sent it rushing smoothly along the underground highways.

  By the time they came out onto the great elevated boulevards that led across suburb and country the long summer dusk was falling. Carey turned and looked back. Outlined against the deep blue the enormous bulk of the city blazed with many-colored light. Even at this distance it had an alien look to his eyes.

  The sleek suburban areas fled by. Beyond them the country still pretended to be as it had been. But Carey’s more primitive eyes detected the deception. Artful hands had arranged the trees and changed the courses of the brooks and pruned the wild hedgerows into pleasing vistas.

  The car left the highway and proceeded along a private road. Presently, upon a slope ahead, Carey saw a graceful structure of metal and glass, shaped by a master hand to fit like a huge synthetic jewel into its setting of terraced gardens.

  The translucent walls gleamed softly and strains of music drifted on the evening air. The gardens were full of fairy lights. As they came closer Carey made out the flutter of women’s skirts among the flowers, heard the sounds of laughter.

  “Looks like a party,” said Otho. “A big one.”

  “We’ll give him a party,” rumbled Grag and cracked his metal knuckles.

  They came to the gates, which were artistic but highly functional. Curt Newton got out. He went to the small viewer that was housed at one side and pressed the communicator stud. After a moment Carey saw him returning to the car.

  “Mr. Lowther is engaged and can see no one,” he quoted and then added, “Particularly us.” He surveyed the gates. “An electronic locking device, operated by remote control or with a light-key — neither of which helps us. Grag, would you care to see what you can do about it?”

  Grag’s photo-electric eyes gleamed as he heaved himself out of the car and strode toward the gates. For a minute his enormous bulk was motionless, leaning forward a little with his hands on the bars, testing the resistance. Then he moved. There was a groaning and snapping and a metallic squeal and the gates were open.

  The car drove on into the grounds. “There was an alarm on the gate, of course,” said Newton. “They’ll be waiting for us and I don’t want any trouble. We had better get out here and go ‘round through the gardens.”

  The air was heavy with the scent of flowers. It was warm and on the terraces the white shoulders of women turned back the moonbeams. The music ran slow and lilting and there was laughter under the colored lights. Curt Newton walked through the gardens and after him came Grag and Otho and John Carey, who was moving in an unreal dream.

  One by one the dancing couples saw them and the laughter stopped. The swirling skirts were still and the faces watched them, not with fear but with an amazement, as children might look at sombre strangers invading their nursery. The music continued, soft and sweet.

  Along the paths between the drooping jasmine and the great pale blooms of Venus, across the terraces, through a sliding wall wide open to the night, and into a pastel room with a vast expanse of mirror-like floor surrounded by graceful colonnades — and here too the dancers drew back from the intruders.

  Then, from one of the archways, came a group of men headed by a tall man no older than Curt Newton. He wore a dress tunic of black silk and his hair was black and his face had a clear healthy pallor. Carey thought that it was the sort of skin a woman might have, shaped smooth over handsome bones and set with wide dark eyes. Only there was nothing womanish about Lowther’s face if by womanish you meant weak or pitying or possessing any softness of heart.

  The men with him were of a type Carey knew and detested. They were the kind who are always somewhere around a man like Lowther.

  The two groups came to a halt and eyed each other. Lowther said, “If you came to say something, say it and get out.”

  Newton put one hand on Carey’s shoulder and pointed with the other to Lowther. “There he is, Carey — the most important man in the Solar System. Oh, the System doesn’t know it yet but he is. And he’s modest too. He owns all the refineries on Pluto but you’d never know it to look at the records.”

  He had raised his voice a bit so that it could be heard clearly above the music. A considerable crowd had collected, drawn in from the gardens, and there were plenty to hear.

  LOWTHER came closer to Newton. He started to speak and Newton went on smoothly, politely, drowning him out. “My friend has been away from Earth for a long time, Mr. Lowther. I wanted him to meet you, so that he could see the type of man we produce now, the successful man. I thought it might teach him a lesson while he’s still young enough to profit by it.

  “You see where you made your mistake, Carey? You went pioneering, and got nothing out of it but hardship and danger and sudden death. You should have stayed at home like Mr. Lowther here, using your wits and letting others do the dirty work of opening up new worlds. See what you’d have had — a fine house, a host of friends, a good steady business with no competition?

  “After awhile, with patience and good judgment, you’d have owned the shipping-lines to which at first you only sold fuel. Doesn’t it make you ashamed, Carey, to think of how you wasted your youth — just as the starmen stranded out there on Pluto are wasting theirs?”

  Lowther’s face was even whiter than before except for two streaks of dull red along his cheekbones. “Listen,” he said, “if you’re so worried about the starmen, you’d better get word to them to watch their step or they’ll be in real trouble.

  “They’re threatening to resort to violence and I’m leaving for Pluto in the morning to see that my property is protected. I don’t know exactly what you’re trying to do, Newton, but even you can’t buck the law — and neither can your friends.”

  Newton’s face was tight and dark but his voice was soft. “There are laws and laws,” he said. “Some of them are so basic they haven’t even been written down. Perhaps someday soon we’ll have a longer talk about laws.”

  He turned abruptly and went back down the long room with the glassy floor and the others went with him. Lowther followed them at a distance, looking after them as they left the grounds.

  In the car, speeding back toward the city, Grag said regretfully, “Why didn’t you let me wring his neck?”

  “He may get it wrung yet out on Pluto,” answered Curt. “When the starmen there find out that I couldn’t do anything for them, they’ll try to do something for themselves.” He turned suddenly to Carey. There was a hard reckless glint in his eyes.

  “Carey,” he said, “do you want to come with us out to Pluto and see a fight?”

  Carey shrugged heavily. “Pluto, Antares — what difference does it make where I am? Yes, I’ll go. I’ll go anywhere that isn’t Earth.”

  He was sick with Earth and opulence and the greedy faces of men. The old horizons were gone and even Pluto, that distant stepchild of the Sun, was the seat of monopoly and all the ugly things that had plagued mankind since the beginning. But it would be a change from Earth.

  Otho said to Curt, “You’re not really going to egg them on to fight?” He said it not with reproof but
with hope.

  Curt answered grimly, “No. They’d only get themselves killed without accomplishing anything. Lowther was right. As of now the law is all on his side.”

  He was silent and then he said, “No, it was another kind of fight I had in mind.”

  He said nothing more, until they reached the spaceport. Then he grinned at Carey, a grin without much humor in it. “I know what you need,” he said. “Grag, go on back to the ship and keep Simon company. Otho and I will help Carey drown his sorrows.”

  Grag went off. Newton and Otho took Carey some distance around the periphery of the port. There was an endless number of joints along the fringe, some of them fashionable, some catering to ordinary spacehands. They entered one of the latter. There were a bar and booths and tables and Carey thought dully that this at least had not changed.

  They sat down. Through the window, which looked out on the flash and thunder of the port, Carey could see the rows of docks and the long sheds with the names on them of this and that line or company. One of them said LOWTHER MINING CORPORATION and there was a sleek ship in its dock with an endless conveyor taking cases of supplies up its gangway.

  “Lowther’s ship, getting ready to take him off to Pluto tomorrow,” said Newton harshly.

  Otho raised his glass toward it. “Confusion to it,” he said.

  Newton moodily watched the distant ship. Carey felt the unfamiliar liquor explode in him like liquid fire. Otho signaled and presently there was another glass in Carey’s hand.

  He was in no mood to refuse it. He had been a long, long time in space, his awakening had been hard, his homecoming bitter. The future was a cold and formless presence, crouched behind a dark curtain.

  Carey drank.

  There was an interval wherein he knew that he talked but was not sure what he said. Then he found himself in cool night air and Otho’s arm was helping him into a ship.

  Even through his haze, Carey knew Simon Wright’s toneless voice by now. “Where is Curtis?” it demanded.

  “He’ll be along,” Otho said easily. “This way, Carey — you need sleep.”

  It was later — how much later he could not guess — when Carey half-roused to voices. Simon’s inflectionless voice and Curt’s.

  “— and you won’t tell me what you’ve been up to?” Simon was saying.

  “There’s nothing to tell, Simon. We got nowhere with Lowther so we came back. Now we’ve got to go out to Pluto and see if we can stop him there.”

  “Curtis, I know you and I know that you have done something. Well, we shall see. But one thing I am sure of and that is that someday your anger will outrun your wisdom and bring you to disaster.”

  Carey drifted into sleep again. He did not even rouse to the shock of take-off. When he woke, the ship was on its way to Pluto.

  Chapter 4: Earthmen No More

  THEY made the long sweeping curve to escape the pull of Neptune and ranged in toward the dim speck that was Pluto. The jumping-off place of the Solar System, with nothing beyond it but interstellar space, riding its dark cold orbit around a Sun so distant that it seemed no greater than the other stars.

  Yet even here, if wealth was hidden away, man would find it. Carey thought that undoubtedly a few shrewd souls would have set up concessions for mining coal in Hell.

  He had watched all the way out from Earth but with only a flicker of the excitement he would once have known. He was interested, of course, because it was his first trip beyond the orbit of Jupiter. But the thrill was gone. People talked of going out to Saturn or Uranus now as they had once talked of going out to California. It gave Carey, somehow, a feeling of having been cheated. In his day going to Mars had been a big thing and fraught with danger.

  From a featureless fleck of reflected light almost too faint to be seen Pluto grew into a recognizable world — a dark world with black wild mountains shooting up against the stars and eerie seas of ice. There was something so cruel and ghostlike in the look of it that Carey could not repress a shudder.

  It seemed rather like an invader from outer space than a member of the familiar System, the more so since in bulk and mass and composition it bore a ghastly resemblance to Earth as though alien demons might have made it as a joke.

  They were a little ahead of Lowther. They had not had much start on him but they had a faster ship.

  “We’ll have a little time,” said Curt. “Even a few hours might be enough to talk some sense into Burke and the others.”

  Burke, Carey gathered, was captain of one of the two star-ships fighting the battle over fuel, was more or less the leader of both crews.

  “They counted on help from the Government,” said Otho. “When they find out what’s happened they’re going to be hard to hold.”

  “We’ve got to hold them,” Curt answered grimly. “They’ll blow their only chance if they start fighting.”

  Simon said nothing but his lens-like eyes followed Curt intently. The forward jets began to thunder and the Comet, still curving, entered its long arc of deceleration.

  As they swept closer Carey saw that the frozen plains were pocked with craters, and that some of the mountain-peaks had been shattered by caroming meteors. The lunar desolation of the world was hideous. Carey thought what it must be like to live and work here.

  “The refinery men get relief at regular intervals,” Curt told him. “And there are a couple of small domed cities around on the other side.”

  Carey nodded. “Even so, Pluto seems a stiff place for them.”

  “It is,” said Curt. “You’ll see.”

  The televisor buzzed. They had been coming in on the automatic beam but now somebody wanted to talk to them. Curt opened the switch.

  A man’s face appeared on the little screen. It wore the expression of one who has been handed a hot wire and doesn’t know how to let go of it. “Lowther Mines speaking,” it said. “Identify yourself.”

  Newton did and the man’s face grew more unhappy. “We can’t very well stop you from landing,” he said. “But keep your distance from the domes — no closer than a hundred yards. There’s a charged barrier.” He added, “We’re well armed.”

  The screen went dark. Curt shook his head. “They’re all set for trouble. Let’s hope it hasn’t already started.”

  Curt set the Comet down at last, on the edge of a vast white plain where it struck against a mountain wall. Carey saw two great dark hulls looming near them with only their mooring lights showing. Well over a hundred yards away, sunk into the living rock of the cliffs so that only the outer bulwarks showed, was a series of steel-and-concrete domes.

  Northward along the plain, in a sector marked off by beacons to warn away incoming ships, were other domes. Here there were rifts and gouges in the barren rock of Pluto, hulks of strange machinery and structures of various sorts whose uses Carey could not be sure of.

  Occasional lights gleamed but nothing moved. The diggers and the ore-carriers were still and no clouds of vapor came from the buried stacks of the refineries.

  “They’re shut down tight,” said Curt. “Regular state of siege.” He looked at the others. “Don’t forget what our friend said about the barrier.”

  They put on protective coveralls — except for Grag and Simon, who needed no such protection. Curt had handed Carey one of the suits. “You’ve come all the way out and you might as well see the fun,” he said.

  Then they went out into the black Plutonian night toward the star-ships. It was intensely dark, colder than anything Carey remembered except that one split-second touch of open space.

  Carey stared at the distant mockery of a Sun, overcome with the feeling that he was indeed on the outer edge of the universe. He was so occupied by his sensations that he was taken completely by surprise when men rose suddenly out of the hollows of the ice and closed around them.

  A torch beam flashed out and struck Curt full in the face. He said, “Burke?” and from beyond the light a voice grunted, “Okay, relax. It’s him.”

  �
�What’s the idea?” Curt demanded.

  “Well,” said Burke, “we picked up your call but we wanted to be sure it really was you and not one of Lowther’s smart tricks.”

  “Or,” said Curt, “did you hope maybe it was Lowther himself, trying to get behind the barrier before you knew who he was?” He glanced around at the shadow-shapes of the men, who were numerous and armed.

  “Maybe,” said Burke. He switched the beam around the Futuremen and onto Carey. “Who’s this?”

  “He’s not Lowther either. His name is Carey and he’s a friend of mine.”

  Burke nodded briefly. His attention returned to Newton. “What’s the news? What did they say on Earth?”

  “Let’s go on to your ship,” said Curt. “I’ll tell you about it there.”

  Burke and the others must have known from the way he said it what the answer was going to be. But they turned silently and went back across the ice with the Futuremen and Carey into their ship.

  They had the port shutters down but there was light inside. It felt very warm to Carey after the spatial chill. They stripped off their heavy garments and went aft into the main cabin, sorting themselves out so that the officers of both star-ships sat down around the battered table and the crews crowded where they could in the passageways to listen.

  CAREY stood unnoticed in a corner of the cabin. He could see these starmen now. They had large scarred hands and faces burned dark as old leather. Their uniform jumpers were worn and their boots were shabby and they wore their greasy caps in a certain way that Carey remembered. He saw the sort of eyes they had too — and those he remembered also.

  Burke leaned forward across the table. He had an oblong face that was mostly bone and sinew like the rest of him and a hungry look around the mouth. “All right,” he said. “Now tell us.”

  Curt Newton told them and as he talked Carey watched the starmen. An eerie feeling crept over him that he had known these men before. He had served with them in the little ships that fought their way along the planetary roads that seemed then so long and hard. It was strange to see these men again, to know that they still lived. He could almost have called them by name except that their faces had altered a bit and he could not be sure.